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Amphibians invites further contemplation of female physicality — what it means to inhabit a female form. An amphibious aircraft crashes in Maine, a young girl skinny-dips with her elders, a distraught cruise ship dancer boards a water taxi in Grenada, and travelers to Dubai and Abu Dhabi long for familiar oceans; back in New England, small-town artists try to smudge out their tedium with seaside transgressions. Amphibians celebrates home in a cross-cultural way, and the sensation of feeling not quite right in one's own skin, on land and near water, at home and abroad.
"From page one, Amphibians is the work of an extraordinary talent. How shrewd and compelling these stories are, as they range from Maine to New York to Japan to the Emirates and back. Their remarkable gift is to show us – wisely and sharply – the crucial contradictions of feeling in whatever unfolds, from passing encounters to long-held ties.” — Joan Silber, PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of Improvement and 2019 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize judge
"What a compelling, wise and beautiful book! I love the sense of place. The way each location feels prickly and alive, like it might lift off the page. Beautiful word choices like: “the muzzy water.” Many others, but this one told me that I was in the hands of a writer. I love the way characters are drawn: “Helen told this story to the girl, who perhaps hadn’t realized there was life before she was born. Or that her mother hadn’t always been like this, braced for the girl’s attention.” I learn about each of them, and about the relationships. The collections stays beautifully in the body. “She wants to say, The chill of the water—it doesn’t last. Most grown-ups can only think about the smack of it, the dread. This is what it means to get older.” This feeling of being cold as a kid vs. being cold as an adult is true and wise, and is also characterizing. There is a lot about bodies in the book, which is terrific.
The fact that the writing is so physical matters because, for example, the first story starts with a mother/daughter relationship and moves through adolescence and into adulthood where a dangerous and unfamiliar world waits. If we weren’t so rooted in the body and physical world it might feel harder to make that leap. It doesn’t. So much is strange, so much is unfamiliar, and the girl in the story is working, working to understand, to sort, to feel. Lovely too that it returns to the water, to the simple, to the one body suspended.
I love the cross-cultural work on the page. I love that we have Japan, the UAE, Rome! All of these stories ask us to think about the idea of home. Home as a cruise ship, home as a place distant enough to be reinvented, home as a gym, home as a body, home as a faraway story. Some of my favorite stories are “Dishdash” (which is also a terrific title!) and “Belly Dancing.” There’s such deep longing in “Dishdash.” I adore the lines: “Maybe he fell in, she thinks now at the bar. Maybe the fish are eating him alive.
Help me, she thinks. Wonder Twin power, activate. But he doesn’t appear.”
The ending of that story nearly killed me. So tense!
Bodies do different work in “Belly Dancing” and the threat of being in a female body, the way that translates when viewed in this place, is striking. But also the freedom of travel and Allie’s wish to reinvent herself. And home, a song she can’t quite hear anymore. The tension between being known and being unknown. It’s really well done. It’s also threatening and genuinely scary.
Excellent dialogue in “The Mission Bell.”
I think the collection ends perfectly with the image of the “you” in “Good Neighbors” untying the rope and bobbing away in the stolen boat. It’s such a small gesture but so huge and representative of everything swirling through the book." — Ramona Ausubel