Danila Botha’s latest collection includes 32 short stories charting the coming-of-age journeys of middle-class millennials. The settings include Canada and Israel, and the female lead characters are in high school, university or beyond and frequently reflecting on experiences that happened when they were younger. The characters are often artists or art school students.
Botha has a straightforward style and a big heart. She captures the subtleties of human relationships, the desires, expectations, disappointments, cruelties, and, yes, moments of inappropriate happiness. This reader wasn’t sure if the metaphor of the title bound the whole collection, but so it goes. The Chekhovian humanism and pulsing empathy throughout is more than evident.
“Botha has a straightforward style and a big heart.”
For example, the story “Look at Him” begins with:
People have always said that I’m good at reading people, that I have a good sense of what they’re thinking and feeling. That sensitivity is what makes me a good artist, a couple of critics have said. It’s what gives my work depth. I wish those qualities were less of a liability in my personal life.
The story, narrated by a first-person female voice, tells of a reunion she has set up with a former boyfriend: “He always struck the safest balance of boundaries and openness of deep interest and distance. It was fine until I started wanting more.”
They go for coffee. They catch up on their lives. They agree, “It was hard, what happened with us.” They separate with a hug and go their own ways. There is reconciliation, but no next step. The narrator wonders if it was fear that kept them apart, “but none of the reasons matter.” Still, we must ask: Was it the narrator’s sensitivity that was her liability? Is it not her sensitivity that enables the moment of reconnection? Botha lets the story end with the tension unresolved.
Moments such as the above repeat through the collection as Botha captures the deep contradictory currents of the heart. She is also capable of delicate ironies and dark humour: “When I meet people I don’t know, I just say I met my husband through work. What I normally don’t say is I’m a midwife, and I met him when I was helping to deliver his then wife’s baby” (“Black Market Encounters”). Yikes!
Botha’s stories deliver news that stays news, reportage from the contemporary front lines. There’s nothing inappropriate about that.
Danila Botha is the critically acclaimed author of short story collections Got No Secrets and the Trillium Book Award, Vine Awards, and ReLit Awards finalist For All the Men (and Some of the Women I’ve Known.) Her award-winning novel Too Much on the Inside was published in 2015. It was optioned for film by Pelee Entertainment in 2023. She is currently working on her new graphic novel and has a new collection of short stories, and a new novel coming out soon with Guernica Editions.
- Publisher : Guernica Editions (April 1 2024)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 200 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1771838701
- ISBN-13 : 978-1771838702
Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.
