More Enduring for Having Been Broken

Gwen Paradice’s end-of-the world stories celebrate our collective last gasp with a mixture of beauty and absurdity. In these confident, clear-eyed tales, young protagonists face the end times with a stoic courage: the orphan who sees his lost family in the architecture of a crab colony, the pre-teen oracle who gives up her protected status to run away with the sacred cow, the servant girl who feeds women’s discarded faces to a school of catfish. In the absence of tradition or authority, there is special warmth emanating from sibling and near-sibling relations. And in the midst of devolution, there is deep engagement with nature in its myriad forms. Throughout, Paradice calls us to witness the surreal spectacle of our own decline, depicting the Wheel of Fortune as a manic Ferris wheel, then a monstrous carnivorous plant imprisoning passengers in its pods.

—Trudy Lewis