review

BLUE JAY – LILLIAN LI

By karen t. brissette

Posted on December 27, 2018

Blue Jay by Lillian Li
My rating: 4/5 cats
One Star

WELCOME TO DECEMBER PROJECT!

boilerplate mission statement intro:

for the past two years, i’ve set december’s project aside to do my own version of a short story advent calendar. it’s not a true advent calendar since i choose all the stories myself, but what it lacks in the ‘element of surprise’ department it more than makes up for in hassle, as i try to cram even MORE reading into a life already overcrammed with impossible personal goals (live up to your potential! find meaningful work! learn to knit!) merry merry wheee!

since i am already well behind in my *regular* reviewing, when it comes to these stories, whatever i poop out as far as reflections or impressions are going to be superficial and perfunctory at best. please do not weep for the great big hole my absented, much-vaunted critical insights are gonna leave in these daily review-spaces (and your hearts); i’ll try to drop shiny insights elsewhere in other reviews, and here, i will at least drop links to where you can read the stories yourselves for free, which – let’s be honest – is gonna serve you better anyway.

HAPPY READING, BOOKNERDS!

links to all stories read in previous years’ calendars can be found at the end of these reviews, in case you are a person who likes to read stories for free:

2016: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…
2017: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show…

scroll down for links to this year’s stories which i will update as we go, and if you have any suggestions, send ’em my way! the only rules are: it must be available free online (links greatly appreciated), and it must be here on gr as its own thing so i can review it. thank you in advance!

DECEMBER 26

I almost never saw Jay outside our room because it was impossible to lock down her routine. She would find an abandoned desk in the library’s basement stairwell and cut up old medical journals to make a collage for our wall, reasoning that no one was going to read them anyways. Or she would take a catnap in the engineering school only to decide she liked the lounge’s couch more than her bed and stay the night. She drove out to concerts in towns six hours away. On a Wednesday, she would wake up and decide to go to Six Flags and ride all the roller coasters, twice. Then there would be days where she wouldn’t leave the bed, sleeping until her eyes were swollen. She would ask me to bring her apples from the dining hall and eat everything, the waxy core, the brittle seeds, everything. I would hand her her ukulele and she would strum and hum while I tapped a beat on the post of our bunk bed. I thought, in these moments, that she was magnificent. That I lived to serve her.

the story of the narrator’s brief, intense, fairly one-sided friendship with her larger-than-life college roommate. it’s a good character study, although the story itself isn’t much more than that. jay sounds exhausting and exactly the kind of person one is drawn to in their late teens/early twenties – all drama and eccentricities and self-destructive behavior distracting from a daaaaark paast who say things like people think diamonds are flawless, but isn’t it true that they can only shine when cut over and over again?

it’s an interesting decision to end the story where she does instead of opting into the more cliched explosive supernova burnout ending