Early reviews of Through The Drowsy Dark are in!

Sara Polsky reviews Mandolin’s new book, Through the Drowsy Dark:

According to an introductory note, the goal of Aqueduct Press’s Conversation Pieces series is to continue the “grand conversation of feminist SF,” and Rachel Swirsky’s Through the Drowsy Dark fits in perfectly. Most of the ten stories and nine poems in Swirsky’s collection, her first, involve female characters as the primary agents: Swirsky’s women make choices or sometimes spend their stories trying to figure out whether they have any choices at all. Some of these women are living in dystopian societies, or in societies that appear to be utopias for everyone but them, certainly a common theme of the overall “grand conversation,” while others are individuals trying to find their places in the world without reference to larger political issues.

Other Swirsky stories I’ve read, such as “A Memory of Wind,” “Eros, Philia, Agape,” and “Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind,” put her on my list of favorite writers of short speculative fiction before I turned the first page of this collection, and while none of those three is reprinted in Through the Drowsy Dark, the stories that do appear here only cemented her place on my favorites list.

Click through to read the entire review.

The reader’s reviews on Amazon are also great. From Nathan Blumenfeld:

As a general thing, I prefer prose to poetry. So while I enjoyed most of the poems, two of them rather a lot, for me the real draw of this collection was the stories, among which there was not a single dud. Swirsky is an insightful, incisive writer, and with these stories she gently (sometimes not so gently) vivisects reality, uncovering truths — often painful, occasionally joyful, frequently delightful — that are sometimes revelatory but that, at their most effective, feel familiar, make me feel I may have allowed myself to get too comfortable living as though I didn’t already know them. Swirky’s imagery is sensual, her stories sensitive and honest, but it is the feelings they evoke that have lingered, that have made these stories stand out in my mind and my imagination.

And from Eva Folsom:

Several of the stories in this collection are profoundly emotionally evocative. I read the collection on a crowded airplane, and at several points, it was all I could do not to break into tears in front of my fellow passengers. I found the unflinching, painful honesty of these stories moving, and am impressed with Swirsky’s courage in confronting the truths they capture. As Swirsky has a character say in “The Debt of the Innocent,” “To stare into the heart of (these) arguments was to stare into the sun.”

Again, click through to read the whole reviews (and buy the book!).

Finally, although it’s not about Through the Drowsy Dark, I must quote Ken Schnyer’s comment about Mandolin’s story “Eros, Philia, Agape,” from his livejournal:

In “Eros, Philia, Agape,” an adult victim of child sexual abuse purchases an android lover, programmed to be exactly what she needs, and not to be the things she fears/hates. The android’s solicitude is so perfect that she comes to love him, militates politically for his rights, and eventually alters his programming so that he is able to self-program, free of any constraints set by her or anyone else. As soon as she does this, he chooses not only to leave her, but to delete the aspects of his personality that make him human, beginning with speech but moving on to attachments of any kind. She is left longing and desolate, he is left moving in a direction he does not know. The story ends on a barely-hopeful note, leaving us with the possibility that maybe, maybe after the android has discovered what/who he really is, he will find that he loves her and return. But maybe not.

As the title suggests, “Eros, Philia, Agape” is a meditation on the compatibility of the different varieties of love. Sexual love can be comforting or can be not love at all, but brutality. Love of the other as other — the wish to promote the happiness of the love object (agape) — may run contrary to desire (eros) and filial love (philia). The beloved, freed to find his own happiness, may desert the family and become an unavailable object of desire. But more to the point, the protagonist learns that the love and intimacy she thought she experienced with her android was the result of the programming; given the freedom to explore himself, he leaves her in a moment. Yet even that is too simple — he may want to love her, but how can he know whether he loves her if he does not know what or who he is? Is it fair to expect desire, or empathy, or loyalty, from someone who is unformed?

ETA: And a last minute addition! On the blog A Dribble of Ink, a review of Mandolin’s story The Stable Master’s Tale.

The Stable Master’s Tale by Rachel Swirsky is a modern parable, with echos of the bite found in the works of The Brothers Grimm. Though there’re no animals in sight, Swirsky has a point to make, a moral to bring to light, and she does so in a grim, honest way that reveals both the light and the dark in humanity.