The Miniature Wife

Starred review from October 22, 2012
It’s rare that a debut author is also a seasoned storyteller, but this is the case with Gonzales, whose first book is a deeply imaginative collection of short stories. With commendable skill, Gonzales seamlessly blends the real and the fantastic, resulting in a fun and provocative collection that readers will want to devour. A child born at 10,000 feet on a hijacked plane retraces the same route around Dallas for “according to our best estimates, around twenty years,” destined to follow this path forever, in “Pilot, Copilot, Writer”; and a man who works as a miniaturizer mistakenly shrinks his wife into a pint-sized but plucky foe in the title story. Gonzales delights and bends the mind with stories featuring a horror movie cast—zombies, in “Escape from the Mall”; the swamp monsters and robots of “Life on Capra II”; and a werewolf on a mission to eradicate any trace of his prior humanity, in “WOLF!” The mixture of the mundane and the surreal is hardly new, but Gonzales carries it off with a fresh voice. A quiet pathos spans the collection, and a well-timed glibness injects these stories with an undercurrent of dark humor. A surprising, delightful, and slyly didactic debut. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit.

November 15, 2012
Imaginative stories elevated by creative renderings of tropes from genre fiction. Debut author Gonzales, executive director of The Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center, offers up a collection of 18 sparely constructed stories, rife with ingenuity and beholden to few rules. The opening story, "Pilot, Copilot, Writer," finds a journalist attempting to make sense of the fact that his hijacked plane has been circling the Dallas skyline for two decades. The title story is about a scientist who, after shrinking his wife to nearly microscopic size, finds himself at war with her. This leads to laugh-out-loud lines like this one, about his wife's paramour: "So what else could I do but cover him in honey and seed and then feed him to the bird?" "One-Horned & Wild-Eyed" explores the rivalry that explodes between two friends--over the unicorn they're keeping in a backyard shed. Still other stories infuse real emotion into nightmarish scenarios. "Life on Capra II" depicts a futuristic solider who pines for his lost love, even as he blasts away at swamp monsters and killer robots. In "All of Me," we meet the zombie lurking inside an office drone, who wishes for nothing more than a date with a married co-worker and to devour the obnoxious guy down the hall. Others, such as "Wolf!" and "Escape from the Mall," are more traditional takes on the monsters of our nightmares. But then Gonzales nails the reader with a roundhouse kick like "Farewell, Africa," about a famous speech delivered in concert with the actual sinking of continents. The author also peppers his collection with five sinister obituaries that are quite fun, if superfluous to this inspired string of off-key hits. Delightfully eerie tales from the dark side.

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January 1, 2013
Debut writer Gonzales blends imagined histories and biographies with the supernatural and scientific in 18 energetic tales depicting the bizarre as everyday events. Largely set in Texas, the author's home, these stylized stories disclose a zombie-infested mall, an animal-ridden house, and a shed-dwelling unicorn. Swamp monsters battle robots and a father becomes a werewolf, while artists and anthropologists reevaluate their careers. In the uproarious title story, a scientist accidentally shrinks his wife, leading to an absurdly ferocious rivalry involving a dollhouse, dead flies, and makeshift moats. And in the collection's defining opener, a writer aboard a hijacked plane that has been circling Dallas for 20 years chronicles his fellow passengers' acceptance of life in airborne captivity. Loosely anchoring the book is a series of wry, encyclopedic entries recounting the mythic lives of a clown, poet, scientist, and zookeeper, respectively, and another about an innkeeper who shares the author's name. Although these whimsical additions feel extraneous in an otherwise fascinating collection, Gonzales expresses empathy and demonstrates an impressive knack for violent humor, disturbing satire, and genre-infused literary fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)