The Insects of Love by Genevieve Valentine
My rating: 3/5 cats
Tears always sting me. Kids who grow up in dry places aren’t supposed to waste water.
i didn’t really get this one.
i registered the recurring motifs and where she megaphones her own linguistic playfulness, but between the time shifts and/or alternate realities and the structural gimmicks and the somewhat strained insect analogies, for me it’s all too much static masking the narrative. it’s got an inconsistent and disjointed flow—the story seems really excited to drop a lot of detailed information about insects—paragraphs worth of traits and behaviors—but when it comes to the human part of the story, it becomes mooshy with “sister sister tattoo desert insinuation lallalalalala story story vague hints constellation,” and then back to more detailed information about insects. there are prolonged shrugs of “who even knows what’s happening?” in-between rigid entomology textbook excerpts, which makes the story hard to follow and the pacing very frustrating.
there’s some pretty writing here, but not enough clarity. and sometimes pretty writing is enough for me, but not this time. and yet it’s not a bad story. let’s just call it “almost good.”
read it for yourself here:
http://www.tor.com/2014/05/28/the-ins…
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