Power to Yield and Other Stories

enne📚 reviewed Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács

Power to Yield

5 stars

This short story collection by Bogi Takács is highly recommended from me. It's tough to evaluate a set of stories as a whole, but this is a set of great stories in a sea of consistently really good ones. Unsurprisingly, this collection deals in gender, religion, and neurodiversity; characters are messy outsiders and never fit simply into boxes.

In lieu of reviewing stories individually, here are some fragmentary moments that stick with me: * a magical apprentice during a war transformed into a water caltrop as a punishment and inadvertently abandoned * a student living in a housebeast and contractually feeding it blood on a regular basis * cultural appropriation of magical clothes harming their wearers * a city maintained by suffering, but rather than an Omelas sense it's a consensual bdsm sense * one story got at nuances between different non-binary identities, something I'd never seen in fiction before

el dang reviewed Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács

Outstanding collection, full of imagination and perspectives I'm not used to

5 stars

Wow. For one thing, it's very rare that I am consistently impressed with every story in a collection, even single-author ones. And it's a wonderfully varied collection too, in subject matter, mood, and form: everything from a two-page story that's actually satisfying to the title one which could have been published as a novella on its own. There are common themes about outsider perspectives and unexpected viewpoints, but a huge range of what those things actually mean. Many of the stories are clearly informed by the author being an intersex Jewish immigrant, but again that shows up in very different ways from one story to the next - this is not an author who just has one thing to say.

Content note: some of the stories have disturbing imagery and themes around abuse, body horror, and/or being trapped. There's a list of specific content notes at the back of the …

Wow. For one thing, it's very rare that I am consistently impressed with every story in a collection, even single-author ones. And it's a wonderfully varied collection too, in subject matter, mood, and form: everything from a two-page story that's actually satisfying to the title one which could have been published as a novella on its own. There are common themes about outsider perspectives and unexpected viewpoints, but a huge range of what those things actually mean. Many of the stories are clearly informed by the author being an intersex Jewish immigrant, but again that shows up in very different ways from one story to the next - this is not an author who just has one thing to say.

Content note: some of the stories have disturbing imagery and themes around abuse, body horror, and/or being trapped. There's a list of specific content notes at the back of the book - if those sort of themes could be a problem for you, it's worth flicking to that first.

interlibraryprone reviewed Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács

Like a warm hug of fiction

5 stars

Read this a few months back and think about regularly - this collection contains some of the most memorable and wonderful short stories I've ever read.

My favourite story was "Folded into tendril and leaf"! This story was one of my favourite reads of 2023, and as far as I'm concerned makes worth getting a copy of the book worth it. It's a gentle love story where one character is intersex, in a magical fantasy setting where war is going on in the background. This one has a character turn into a plant, which is a theme across multiple stories. The themes that span multiple stories (like intersex people relating to plant life) help the whole collection cohere together.

The stories "The 1st interspecies solidarity fair and parade", and "Power to yield" also stood out for me - both engaging stories about being interconnected that value the variety of human …

Read this a few months back and think about regularly - this collection contains some of the most memorable and wonderful short stories I've ever read.

My favourite story was "Folded into tendril and leaf"! This story was one of my favourite reads of 2023, and as far as I'm concerned makes worth getting a copy of the book worth it. It's a gentle love story where one character is intersex, in a magical fantasy setting where war is going on in the background. This one has a character turn into a plant, which is a theme across multiple stories. The themes that span multiple stories (like intersex people relating to plant life) help the whole collection cohere together.

The stories "The 1st interspecies solidarity fair and parade", and "Power to yield" also stood out for me - both engaging stories about being interconnected that value the variety of human experience and expression.

There isn't a lot of literature by openly intersex authors that advances intersex representation. It's even rarer to find this kind of representation that ALSO is genuinely good writing. This short story collection pulls it off.

My one complaint is the order of stories. The first couple of stories are IMO the weakest of the collection. They're not bad, but it's a shame that the strongest stories are tucked away in the middle of the book.

I recommend starting with Tendril & Leaf or the Solidarity Fair stories rather than the default order.

Power to Yield and Other Stories

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