Resurrections

by Ada Hoffmann, Nancy Wu (reader)

This collection of short stories and poems by Ada Hoffmann traverses extraordinary universes packed with faeries, cyborgs, talking otters, punitive gods, lovestruck sea creatures, fossil hunters, extraterrestrials, and much more. Exploring themes of love and self-existence, community and otherness, and perseverance, Resurrections is a wondrous blend of genres and literary forms.

In “Jenny’s House,” a young girl brings a slimy souvenir from a playdate gone wrong to show-and-tell. “Variations on a Theme from Turandot” is the story of a devout slave’s struggle with a stubborn, ruthless princess, replayed as an epic opera every night. In “Transitional Chords,” an unmotivated conservatory student finally connects with music when he falls victim to an otherworldly voice. “Harmony Amid the Stars” chronicles a spaceship’s inhabitants’ descent into madness through a cleaning lady’s diary. “I Sing Against the Silent Sun” is about the unbreakable bond between a fugitive and his ship’s AI.

Each universe contains an intricately crafted history, cast of characters, places, and paradoxes. From layered magical realms to beauty supply storerooms, Hoffmann brings often-overlooked characters and perspectives to life and lets their unfettered reality expand our imaginations. Resurrections is a glimpse into the spectrum of human existence, flitting from world to world in Hoffmann’s spectacular style.

Genres: Poetry, Polyamory, Fantasy, Short Stories

1 pages, Audio CD

First published December 19, 2023

Reviews

[Rachel (TheShadesofOrange) · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 Stars
Video Review: https://youtu.be/Kri0TLzmctk

As someone who loves the Outside Trilogy, I have been dying to read more by Ada Hoffman. I don't read and review a lot of short fiction these days but I had to make an exception for this author.

I liked that this book was a collection of speculative fiction with a lot of range. As someone who rarely reads poetry, I did not expect to love the poems so much but they ended up being my favourite parts. I found the short stories to be interesting with some naturally stronger than others.

I really love the creativity of this author. Her mind is brilliant and I really like spending time in her worlds. As someone who enjoys the darkness, I was pleasantly surprised that some of these short works went to some darker places.

I'm biased to prefer long fiction, which is reflected in this review. I still prefer the Outside books but I would recommend this one to those also looking for more from this talent author.

Disclaimer I received a copy of this book from the publisher.

[Kaa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oof, this is a difficult collection for me to rate because I had such a range of reactions. I think Hoffmann's imagination and writing talent are on full display throughout, but there is a huge variety in the tone and feeling of the stories and poems that are included. I did get a sense of how the stories had been arranged into sections, although perhaps unfortunately this put most of my least favorite pieces toward the beginning. The first section in particular was quite dark and often quite experimental, which tended to go over my head. As the book progressed, I found myself enjoying more and more of both the stories and poems. I really adored "I Sing Against the Silent Sun" (co-written with Merc Fenn Wolfmoor), and would also include "Research Lab Electricity Usage Timesheet Reporting" and "The Scrape of Teeth and Bone" among my favorites.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an eARC.

[Netanella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Simply phenomenal.

I'm familiar with Hoffman's work, having read one of her earlier novels. I did not realize that she has such a range of talents, including some incredible poetry in this collection (most of which was probably too smart for me!). This collection of short stories, novellas, and poems are centered around the theme of death, descent into an underworld, and resurrection. I had some favorites, including a strange fairy tale featuring a polyamorous otter, a strange story about a piano accompanist, a rusalka tale, and finally my fav favorite, a co-authored story titled "I Sing Against the Silent Sun."

This collection reminds me that I need to go back and read all of the Ada Hoffman that I can find!

[Annarella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ada Hoffman can't do anything wrong in my book and this an intriguing and fascinating anthology of short stories and poems.
It could be a good way to get to know her or a must read if you love her
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

[Kristenelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm an Ada Hoffmann stan. IMHO she is criminally unknown and deserving of so much more recognition. I picked up this short story collection as soon as I saw that she had released it and invited a friend to buddy read with me. (We read it about a year ago at this point, but I'm only now getting caught up on reviews.) I've read a number of short story collections with this friend and we have very different reading tastes. We frequently love and hate opposite stories. We both loved almost all of the stories in this collection though!

These stories range in tone and genre. Many are humorous and have elements of horror and speculative fiction. The author successfully infuses her stories with her personal life experiences, such as being neurodivergent and a professional soprano. One of my favorite stories is set in the same universe as The Outside..

There is also a lot of speculative poetry in this collection....which isn't so much my thing. There were a couple stories I didn't vibe with perfectly. On the whole though, I strongly recommend this collection for short story and speculative fiction lovers! It delivers!

[Siavahda · Rating 3 out of 5]

HIGHLIGHTS
~nonbinary sky-otters with anxiety
~so many flavours of autistic!
~i’m not smart enough for this poetry
~LOCK THE DAMN DOOR
~much meh, but oh the greats are GREAT

It’s almost always really difficult to rate short story collections; inevitably, some stories are better than others, so how do you spin a rating out of that?

Resurrections is especially difficult, because I really did not enjoy myself for most of it – I very nearly DNFed it – but the stories I liked (all in the second half of the collection) I really loved.

So???

Resurrections is gathered into four parts; Dusk, Midnight, The Small Hours, and Dawn. I will be honest: I didn’t see or sense any rhyme or reason to the divisions. Or to the collection as a whole. And that’s really how I felt about most of the stories (and almost every poem): that I just wasn’t getting it. You know the feeling when you read something, and there’s the niggling suspicion that this is supposed to be very High Brow and you’re just not smart enough to grasp how clever it all is? That hit me with the very first story – Variations on a Theme from Turnadot, which is, as best I could make out, about the characters in an opera coming to life and manifesting through the actresses/singers who play them in order to, very slowly, change the opera’s ending. But I didn’t understand exactly what happened in that ending – did the characters swap hearts? something like that? – and I didn’t enjoy the story for itself; I was bored, for all that I recognised at least some of the Powerful Themes I ought to have been impressed by. Or at least interested in.

That was my experience with most of the collection; I was bored or confused or both. I didn’t see the point of stories like Jenny’s House or Back Room or Harmony Amid the Stars, and I really disliked the premises (although that’s a matter of personal taste – I don’t like stories with unhappy endings, or bad shit happening to kids). (A note: I was told there would be content warnings, but my copy didn’t have any. I’m pretty sure they’ll be in the finished copy, though.) Nightmare IV was a wishy-washy floaty thing that was barely a story at all, as was The Button. I had no idea what was happening in Rabbit Pulls a Magician Out of Her Hat, which is written in an experimental style I couldn’t figure out. And so on.

Some stories had interesting premises, but I was left unsatisfied; I wanted more, novellas rather than short stories, something with room to explore more and give me more answers about what was going on.

And let’s be real: I’m not a poetry aficionado. There are poets I adore, and some styles/modes I find fascinating or impressive, but it’s been a long time since I read a poetry collection. Most of the poems here, I couldn’t make head or tail of. I’m positive I missed the nuance and deeper meaning of the ones that did make some kind of sense to me. I’m not smart enough for this kind of poetry, and I don’t enjoy it.

But it’s not all bad! A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover From the Bottom of the Sea is a beautiful and strange tale of magic, love, and autonomy; The Herdsman of the Dead explores overcoming depression (I think?) through a wonderfully folkloric trip to the land of the dead; and Fairest of All takes the idea that the myth of the changeling is inspired by autistic children and runs with it – right into fairyland, and polyamory with a nonbinary sky-otter! Two stories return us to the world of Hoffman’s Outside trilogy, which was a nice surprise, and I Sing Against the Silent Sun, co-written with Merc Fenn Wolfmoor and set in Wolfmoor’s Sun Lords of the Principality series, is an aching masterpiece of resistance, love, and the power of words and voices. Queer and autistic rep abound throughout, in the stories I didn’t enjoy as well as the ones I did; I really appreciated that all of Hoffman’s autistic characters were different – their autism presented/manifested in very different ways, just like it does in real life. (But then, I’d expect no less from the writer of the Autistic Book Party!)

All in all, I think the Greats are more than worth the price of admission, and I think readers who more regularly enjoy short stories will probably enjoy more of the stories here than I did – I’m used to, and my preference is for, big thick doorstoppers, after all. I know I’m not the best person to be judging short stories!

But the Greats here really are amazing.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Resurrections, by Ada Hoffmann, brings together a diverse range of the author’s short stories under four loose headings — Dusk, Midnight, The Small Hours, and Dawn — which they elucidate in the enlightening notes at the end of the book.

The stories are broadly speculative/sci-fi, and many of them incorporate elements of fantasy, fairy tale, and/or horror. As poetry really isn’t my area (I know I liked the poems, but I can’t articulate why!), this review will stick to the prose.

In the notes I took as I read each story, three words come up time and again: imaginative, compelling, and interesting. It blew me away how each piece had a unique premise that could only be the product of a brilliant mind, and it was so exciting to see where Hoffmann took each of these ideas.

What’s more, each piece is exquisitely written. Even though one or two stories went over my head a little, I could nonetheless very much appreciate the beauty of the writing.

I really loved, and felt inspired by, the way the author uses fantastical, inventive writing to communicate their own experiences and values.

Hoffmann is autistic, and accordingly, so are many of their characters. Not only are varying characteristics of autism represented — Back Room features two young sisters, one sensory-sensitive and the other a sensory-seeker — but so is autistic joy. We also see autistic characters living in worlds where their needs are actually considered and accommodated.

The stories under the ‘Midnight’ heading, meanwhile, convey the author’s experiences of unhealthy relationships and mental illness in dreamy, fairy tale/myth-like, and moving ways.

As with any collection of short stories, I had my particular favourites. One of these was the aforementioned Back Room, where two young sisters discover an unfeasibly large storeroom in the back of what is essentially a branch of Lush. Like my favourite story in Sertaline Dreams, by Oli Jacobs, this chimed with recurring dreams I have, and would love to wrangle into story form myself one day.

I also loved the premise behind Melting Like Metal — cyborg angels prosecuting human “heretics” who defy their AI-powered gods! — as well as its gripping execution, so I was very excited to find out that Hoffmann (a new author to me) has written three novels that take place in this universe. In fact, the first of these, The Outside was the very next book I read.

Of the more fairy tale-like stories, I especially liked Five Songs and a River, an enchanting and dreamy piece about an autistic rusalka — or is she?

The Scrape of Tooth and Bone, meanwhile, stood out to me because it’s such a brilliant mishmash of ideas — Victorian lesbian autistic spiritualist robotics engineer joining a fossil dig on another planet! — and it works so, so well.

Like the fun and cute Research Lab Electricity Usage Timesheet Reporting, in which toddler-like robots help keep an annoying boss out of a scientist’s office, The Scrape of Tooth and Bone shows Hoffmann is great at levity, as well as more serious pieces.

Resurrections is a mesmerising, inventive, and insightful collection.

[Jacqueline Nyathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ada Hoffman’s collection of short stories and poems is divided into four sections thematically: Dusk, Midnight, The Small Hours, and Dawn—because, the author says, they were exploring ‘underworlds’: “How we descend into them, how we try to find or comfort each other within them, and how we eventually find our way back out.” (Yay for story notes from the author!) There’s wonderful variety here, and so much honesty and human connection. And in most of these stories, there’s strong disability rep, especially for autism.

My favourite stories. *Transitional Chords* is a spooky story about the power of music, with a very cool, very grim ending (ikr). *Back Room* is also excellent, about a child with hypersensitivity to sensory stimulation who gets lost in a store. It’s sad, but lovely. The unsettling *Harmony Amid the Stars* is set on a spaceship, and all the crew are slowly going mad because the stars are speaking to them. Wonderful. *As Hollow as a Heart* imagines a kind of Stockholm Syndrome situation, to my mind. *A Spell To Retrieve Your Lover From the Bottom of The Sea* is soo sad on the grief of trying to rescue a loved one from themselves. So’s *The Herdsman of the Dead*, a very similar idea. *Fairest of All* is about abuse in relationships, set in fairytaleland. It’s vividly imagined, and I loved it, although it’s a pretty hard read. (It also has a polycule.) *Five Songs and a River* is about doomed love, and also finding yourself.

There are two stories about avenging angels of gods, from the *Outside* trilogy; *Melting like Metal*, and *Minor Heresies*. The angels are wildly, incredibly cool and scary, as angels should be. And the ‘failed’ angel in *Minor Heresies* still manages to be really cool. Although the author says religion is “complicated” for them, the exploration of it in these two stories is fascinating. And religion pops up elsewhere in the collection, like in *The Scrape of Tooth and Bone*, which is about spiritism (well, Spiritualism) and archeology and fossils, and in the poems *Prayer: A Cautionary Tale*, and *The Raising of Lazarus*. (The author explains in the story notes at the back that they had thought of using Easter as the theme of the collection, so it’s a strong throughline.)

Other poetry: I liked and laughed at *Married Men*, because it’s so relatable: *They make these dipsh_ts in a factory in Milwaukee/Carve ‘em out of fancy-grade tin, draw the eyes/just so, round and mournful or cunning or merry. … You can collect the damn things*. Brilliant.

No one is as interesting as someone who’s faced their demons/is grappling with them and uses that battle for art. I don’t mean to be trite at all, but Hoffman is honest about their struggles as driving their work, and it’s beautiful, and powerful, and resonant. This is an excellent collection.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Apex Book Company for access to a DRC.

[Dawn Vogel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Resurrections by Ada Hoffmann is a wonderful collection of speculative fiction stories and poetry, ranging through a variety of themes and lengths. Many of the pieces feature neurodiverse and/or queer characters, either explicitly or implicitly.

The collection as a whole is brilliantly assembled, with many of the stories arranged in such a way that they seem to be commenting on one another. My favorites were wide ranging in terms of genre and tone. Although I’m not familiar with the opera, “Variations on a Theme from Turandot” is a lovely opening to the book, creating an internal conversation on actors, characters, and choices. “As Hollow as a Heart” is a fascinating variation on the story of Bluebeard. The method of telling “The Herdsman of the Dead” is everything I wanted in a story told in second person (though with a very clear “you” in mind), exploring the idea of temporarily dying in order to find joy, and the twist at the end tied the whole thing together perfectly. Finally, “The Scrape of Tooth and Bone,” a sort of steampunk-inspired story about paleontology, was filled with wonderful characters, twists, and dilemmas.

As is the case with any collection, readers are sure to find some stories that delight them, and the options abound in Resurrections.

The publisher provided me with an advance copy of this collection for review consideration.

[Clara Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know if I’ve read another collection where the whole was so much more than the sum of its part. While several of the stories were closer to horror than I usually read, they enticed me with their curious perspectives. What’s more, the main characters were all curious in different ways—which made me eager to read every one to see how they might fit together.

For those who share my appreciation of ocean themes, there are plenty of sea creatures in the poems (which I wouldn’t know how to review, but enjoyed for contrast in form and tone) and stories like “A Spell to Retrieve Your Lover from the Bottom of the Sea” (which was so much more than I expected from the title that it partly won me over to second person storytelling). For what it’s worth, “The Scrape of Tooth and Bone” has no sea creatures but works for me in many of the same ways, as archeologists delve into the unknown on an Earth not too unlike our own.

I appreciate how Hoffmann can fold what might be huge personal issues in another story into a shift in perspective on whatever surreal horror comes into play. There’s also plenty of great neurodivergent representation and gender diversity, which brings me joy even when the characters pretty much walk into hell—or back again and again.

[Shannon (That's So Poe) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ended up really enjoying this collection. It's my first time reading Hoffman's work, but it's really atmospheric and filled with fascinating world-building, which I loved. At times it was a little heavy-handed in themes, but the topics it explored were all really interesting to me. Not all of the poetry clicked for me, but towards the end there were some poems that really stood out and made an impact.

[Sofia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a collection of small stories or poems and each one has a different theme. Like wise some I liked more and some I liked less, overall is an OK collection, and it gave me a good inside in how this author tells her stories.

It's not my favourite collection of stories but its not bad, and I recommend for you to try it out to see if this author can become one of your new favourites.

Thank you Netgalley and Apex Book Company, for the free ARC and this is my honest opinion.

[Maria Haskins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning collection of short fiction and poetry, where vividly imagined universes, characters, near and distant futures and fantastical worlds come to life. Includes one of my all-time favourite short stories, "Variations on a Theme From Turandot" and so so so many other outstanding stories. I had not read Hoffman's poetry before but I loved every bit of it.

[Rebecca Treasure · Rating 5 out of 5]

Resurrections is a beautiful collection with stories ranging from fantasy to science fiction interspersed with poetry. I really loved "Back Room", "Dunkleosteus", and "Across the Ice".

Disclosure: I work for the publisher.

[Irene · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a short afternoon escape this is perfect. I didn't think poems and short stories could immerse me as fully as a full length novel, but these did and they felt just the right length, even though I obviously would have wanted to read more!

[Cynthia Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this collection.

[Venneh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely gorgeous collection of poetry and short stories that focus on gender, not fitting in a given space, and riffs on fairy tales, and also plays with form for fun while she’s at it. I’m definitely interested in reading more from her, and while it took a while to read, it was always a joy to read when I opened it up.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the however-many dozen stories that are retold over and over through time, I have always found the death, decent, and rebirth one of the most powerful and adaptable. In their collection of poetry and short stories Resurrections, Ada Hoffmann brings us down into many different types of underworlds and, hopefully, brings us back up in the end.

I was already passingly familiar with Hoffmann and their Weird space opera Outside trilogy, though its been burning a hole in my TBR. That has moved up the list a few places after Resurrections. In the story notes (which I love in my collections, btw), Hoffmann talks about selecting the pieces for this collection around a loose theme of "'underworlds' - how we descend into them, how we try to find our comfort each other within them, and how we eventually find our way back out." The main characters in most of these stories are explicitly or implied to be autistic and queer, and I highly recommend going to Hoffmann's website where they run an Autistic Book List to expand your reading horizons.

The alternating stories and verse are sometimes dark, often challenging, and with endings that stretch the definition of "happy". They run the full range of Hoffmann's decade-long writing career, moving from fairy tale to space opera to steampunk paleontological adventure! The latter, 'The Scrape of Tooth and Bone', might be one of the highlights for me for its sense of fun and creativity. Likewise, the two stories set in the world of The Outisde were fascinatingly strange - and very much encouraged me to finally get to the novels! I suspect I will be revisiting 'Variations on a Theme From Turnadot' as well. What started, according to Hoffmann's note, as a fix-it fic for the Puccini opera has become here a strong story of power disparities and storytelling. 'I Sing Against the Silent Sun', written in collaboration with the excellent Merc Fenn Wolfmoor, blew my socks off and broke my heart - after that, I couldn't even remember which of the earlier stories fell flat for me - whatever the case, they were worth it for that fantastic conclusion.

I was provided a copy of this book to review by Apex Books.