Red by Ramsey Shehadeh
My rating: 3/5 cats
Outgrowing stuff is depressing, she’d say. I’d rather not.
meh. i was kind of tempted to give this one two stars cats, because i felt completely abandoned at the end of it, and a little surly. but then i thought maybe it was just the frame of mind i was in, with personal loss clouding my perception, so i ended up going with a three, but it’s a charitable, qualified three.
up until the ending, i was getting along just fine with the story—it presented an interesting scenario—a boy whose sister had gone missing, who felt guilty over her disappearance because he had abandoned her on their walk home in order to go flirt up a girl, and his search for her within the structure of a board game his parents had designed for them. it was a nice blend of sorrow and ambiguous magical realism—maybe happening/maybe just elaborate coping mechanism yadda yadda. it had good movement, mixing back and forth between memory, adventure, guilt, grief, and observation.
but then it just…ends. it culminates in this moment of acceptance/closure for the character:
“Ok,” he said. “I get it.” He looked up and saw that the POLICEMAN was standing at the head of LIGHT STREET, beside the WAREHOUSE, watching him. “I get it.”
and then a concluding action that kind of left me baffled because i, for one, did not get it.
i’m perfectly willing to write off my comprehension-fail as the result of blurry-brained grief and exhaustion, but i have a suspicion that the open-endedness was intentional and meant to be one of those ‘interpret it any way you want’ stories that’s fine for some readers, but if i’m expected to draw my own conclusions, i need more bread crumbs to follow. or more sleep. either way, it’s a low three stars cats, whether the fault is my own or the story’s…
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2017/05/24/red/
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