Hello, everyone! My first read this yr was A Tiny Feast by Chris Adrian (2009).
I only finished a short story so far. It's about two fairies, a couple, who adopted a human child to save their marriage. Soon they found out that the child has developed leukemia. Since they have never experienced illness before, they had a hard time understanding how humans deal with it.
- Very interesting writing. I love how the author represents a sad topic in a humorous, fancy way. Figurative description of characters and actions. Whimsical yet poignant message on sickness, parenthood, and loss.
Some lines that I like:
~ "He didn't want food. He wanted to be well, to run on the hill in the starlight, to ride on the paths in the park in a cart pulled by six raccoons. He wanted to spend a day not immersed in hope and hopelessness."
~ "Oberon had voiced a fear that the boy was sick for human things, that the cancer in his blood was only a symptom of a greater ill—that he was homesick unto death. So she imagined they were putting into him a sort of liquid mortal sadness, a corrective against a dangerous abundance of faerie joy."
~ "there was an infection in the bones of his face... Dr. Blork had said that a fungus was growing there...
Oberon had said that mushrooms were some of the friendliest creatures he knew, and that he could not understand how they could possibly represent a threat to anyone, but Blork shook his head, and said that this fungus was nobody's friend, and further explained that the presence of the new infection compromised the doctors' ability to poison the boy anymore, and for that reason the leukemia cells were having a sort of holiday."