REVIEW: “River, Clap Your Hands” by Sherée Renee Thomas

Review of Sheree Renée Thomas,  “River, Clap Your Hands”, Uncanny Magazine Issue 40 (2021): Read Online. Reviewed by Isabel Hinchliff.

Ava lives a life of waterborne mystery: she was abandoned on a riverbank as a child, her neck has gills, and she pines after her lost baby, birthed in the midst of a flood. Told in a series of striking vignettes, her story is heartbreaking and yet still offers glimmers of hope, like the play of sunlight over deeply ridged scales. It is an exquisite piece of craft, and a vivid picture of a life strung between two irreconcilable worlds.

This haunting and deeply poetic story has layers; I enjoyed luxuriously re-reading it and hunting out new strands of meaning. On my first read, I found myself fascinated by piecing together the vignettes in chronological order and discovering the true nature of Ava’s physical condition. On my second, with the entire premise already in mind, I discovered many instances of nuance and poetic meaning that I had originally missed. Ava’s rain- and grief-drenched world is deeply relatable at some moments and distantly beautiful in others. It is a delicious mix of craft, imagery, and catharsis; I highly recommend it.

Isabel HinchliffLeave a comment

REVIEW: “Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight” by Sheree Renée Thomas

Review of Sheree Renée Thomas, “Tree of the Forest Seven Bells Turns the World Round Midnight”, Apex Magazine 101: Read Online. Reviewed by Joanna Z. Weston.

The main action is simple: Wilder is hiking through the Tennessee woods at night with his lover, Thistle, in order to meet her mother. The language is dense and lyrical, dripping with portent. In order to get the most of this one, you have to be willing to let yourself sink into that language without worrying too much about the plot. The narrative follows a meandering path though the present and the past, dipping into Wilder’s attempts to woo Thistle, into their relationship, and occasionally into his life before her, before returning to the present day. The point of this story is not the plot (though it’s a fine, well-developed plot). The point of this story is the characters, mood, and feeling. It is the dawning realization that all is not as it seems to the narrator, and the inevitable resolution.

While I admire the luscious language and the the languid journey, I personally found that this story moved too slowly for me, towards a resolution that I guessed at shortly after the opening lines. An inevitable ending isn’t necessarily a bad thing – sometimes it can allow the reader to focus on the journey over the destination – but it didn’t entirely work for me in this case. I kept thinking about how the details and diversions might come together in the end, when they were the point in and of themselves. Each memory, each observation, feeds the mood, giving it depth and weight. That is the point: to be fully immersed in the world, so that ending, once it arrives, has a gravity to it.

I want to emphasize that I didn’t dislike this story – I think it’s expertly written and executed – I just wasn’t able to sink into as fully as I wanted to. If you love to linger over dense prose, lyrical descriptions, and a beautifully meandering narrative, then this may well be the story for you.

J.Z. WestonLeave a comment