Title: Homesick- Stories
Author: Nino Cipri
Genre: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Short Stories
Number of Pages: 197
Rating: B
Recommended?: Yes
From the author of Finna and Defekt, Homesick is a collection of creative and unpredictable short stories which often feature transgender and non-binary characters.
I’m going to keep this review short. I still haven’t figured out the best way to review short story collections. Do I write brief descriptions of each individual story, or is that something readers want to discover for themselves? Anyway, I loved several of these stories. My favorites were the one about the trans guy from the time-travelling family (on his mom’s side) and the woman who returns to her family home, a strange and ever-shifting building where rooms disappear and reappear and get bigger and smaller.
Cipri doesn’t try to explain the strange occurances they describe, preferring to focus on how they affect individual characters and relationships. I thoroughly enjoyed most of the stories but the last one (about a trans guy discovering a extinct species of mammal that appeared to display human-like intelligence) really dragged for me.
I’m not sure why, but I just wasn’t interested in the characters (even in the first story, the one with the closet ghost that smelled like apricots, the characters were interesting even though the story itself was very short.) Unfortunately the story that dragged was really long, far longer than any of the others. If it weren’t for that last story and me feeling it was boring and unnecessarily long I would have given this a much higher rating.
Nino Cipri is a talented writer but I recommend that people curious about their work read Finna and Defekt first, as I enjoyed them more and I think they’re better examples of their work.
Sarah's Corner 