You Have Never Been Here

October 5, 2015
Beautiful, descriptive prose enriches tales of ghosts, loss, and regret in this leisurely collection. Rickert (The Memory Garden) draws heavily from Gothic concepts of watery lovers (“Journey into the Kingdom”) and dead children (“Holiday”) while giving her stories more modern protagonists. The prose is designed to be read slowly, with sentences such as “He smelled the odd odor of saltwater and mud, as if she were both fresh and loamy” forming a picture in the reader’s mind. In some cases, the whole is less than its eloquent parts; “Cold Fires,” for example, meanders in the cliché of story-within-story. However, there are several standouts, including “The Christmas Witch,” a structurally creative tale featuring a young girl’s obsession with bones, and the novella “The Mothers of Voorhisville,” which uses multiple narrators to good effect as a town deals with a strange series of births. Fans of Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link will appreciate Rickert’s explorations of myth and memory.

October 1, 2015
Short stories about people haunted by loss and transformed by grief. Ghosts walk through this collection. Witches are rumored. People collect bones, sprout wings, watch their feet turn into hooves. Above all, people tell stories]stories that cast spells, stories that change the world. In "Journey into the Kingdom," a tale about ghosts who walk out of the sea has a powerful effect on a young widower. In "Anyway," a mother asks herself what she would sacrifice to save her son's life. In the collection's longest story, "The Mothers of Voorhisville," a group of women are drawn together when they realize their newborn babies have something very strange in common. Not every piece sings, but those that do have a powerful, haunting effect. As the mother of a dead girl puts it in "The Chambered Fruit," the best of these stories show how "from death, and sorrow, and compromise, you create," how "this is what it means...to be alive." Rickert's (Holiday, 2010, etc.) writing is crystal-clear, moody, occasionally blood-chilling. Her characters maneuver through a world where strange, troubling transformations are possible, but they live and breathe on the page, fully human. The worlds Rickert creates are fantastical, but her work should appeal not just to fantasy fans, but to anyone who appreciates a well-told tale.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2015
Rickert's latest collection contains haunting tales of death, love, and loss. In stories that are imbued with mythology, beasts, and fantastical transformations, Rickert captures the fanciful quality of regret and longing. Ghosts feature prominentlyghosts of family members, ghosts of randomly murdered girls, ghosts that steal a person's life with a kiss. They show up and disappear on a whim, as commonplace as the livingnothing is too strange for her worlds. Strong mother and daughter characters and an ongoing thread of sexuality give this collection a feminist touch, though not without sometimes-grotesque subjects: in one story, a town of young women becomes pregnant by a charming newcomer. Rickert's blend of dark and whimsy is reminiscent of Angela Carter. Perfect for readers looking for something unique, melancholy, and fantastical.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)