Let All the Children Boogie by Sam J. Miller
My rating: 3/5 cats
But I was done letting wishing I was better stop me from being what I was.
i love sam j. miller and i love a story full of bowie and iggy pop (hahah i typed iggy poo) and the pixies, but instalove is always boring, lauren doesn’t really have any depth-of-character, and woke gender politics aside, as much as it may be theoretically true that gender was just a set of clothes we put on when we went out into the world, biological genitals and teen pregnancy are still real and i don’t think it’s unevolved for the mother of a teenage girl to exert a little parental responsibility when it comes to the specifics of a slumber party occurring under their own roof with some stranger their daughter just picked up at a thrift store.
additionally, gender aside, we are all incredibly vulnerable when we’re asleep, so letting some stranger danger into your home is risky, no matter how insta- is your child’s love.
while i didn’t love the story, or feel it ultimately delivered on its premise, it reads like a good pitch for a YA novel and would probably work better if it were tweaked into a longer and more satisfying piece; some sort of contemporary spin on Pump Up the Volume with SF elements.
read it for yourself here:
https://www.tor.com/2021/01/06/let-al…
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