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Your Sick
Fever dreams turn kids into parrots, lungs sprout seeds, and a lover’s infection infuses into her name. In this collaborative collection, real contagions transform into magical kinds of sickness, from airborne amnesia to genetic tornados to plague-stricken mail. These magical stories offer no cures for the human condition, but they will infect you with dreams of a different kind of life.
166 pages, Paperback
Published February 23, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 3, 2016
Dark and dire stories that are interconnected through themes of illness, infidelity, and gender fluidity well as character and place. Some stories crash through your walls with a sledgehammer while others slip-slide quietly across the floor.
July 23, 2017
There's a lot going on in these stories, whether you find yourself wondering, as I did, about the collaborative nature of the writing (Colen is one of three women credited on the cover and inside) or the stories themselves, which are rife with magical realist transformations and slippery identities. But for all this antic energy, it got kind of samey.
I understand the thematic clarity of having so many of the stories dealing with an illness, or someone being gay and discovering that, or the queering of things in the broader sense, but it got a little repetitive here. And while I thought a lot of the stories had promising and memorable opening gambits-- a woman who grows storms in her garden, a woman whose daughter was transformed into a parrot, a high school girl whose eating disorder makes her a storm, and on and on-- very few of them resolved in a way that I felt like really answered the questions these stories posed.
I understand the thematic clarity of having so many of the stories dealing with an illness, or someone being gay and discovering that, or the queering of things in the broader sense, but it got a little repetitive here. And while I thought a lot of the stories had promising and memorable opening gambits-- a woman who grows storms in her garden, a woman whose daughter was transformed into a parrot, a high school girl whose eating disorder makes her a storm, and on and on-- very few of them resolved in a way that I felt like really answered the questions these stories posed.
March 14, 2016
This book was really strange and super in a manner that I adore. Unique characters and the exchanges between the narrative and dialogue in most of the stories in this collection were super duper! I was only aware of Elizabeth Colen's work (a fan!) before this book arrived, and so it also turned me on to two other new authors, which is great! The 'magical realism' within the book is also exceptional. You can read this cover to cover in one sitting, but don't. Savor the stories first! Then read the next. Nice book for a collaboration collection as well!
June 9, 2025
I came to this book as a big fan of Kelly Magee, and this might be quite a thorough collaboration, as it's hard to point out her particular contributions, but if you know Kelly Magee at all, you also know there's With Animal, a collaboration with Carol Guess, who is also one of the collaborators of this book, so perhaps that loss of being able to pinpoint Magee's individual contributions perhaps attests to how complete this collaboration is. The first handful of stories are utter powerhouses, about a propensity for forgetting one's baby, a parrot who may be (or may simply be the delusion of the mother) a girl who suddenly transformed into one, etc.. These stories have a wonderful way of sculpting every paragraph sentence by sentence:
"When you walked through the door, I knew. Our eyes met, and it was the reverse of the first time our eyes met, strangers. Our eyes met, and I knew you'd forgotten our baby. She wasn't across town with your mom or out of sight in her swing. She was somewhere else, in the wide world without us. You gasped as if drowning and raced out the door."
That's a paragraph that packs in so much about a relationship, its crumbling, and we are still in the early throes of the story. Later in this collection, we find a string of connected stories that didn't hold as much impact for me, but overall there are a lot of strengths to this collection, especially a theme of sickness that turns around and reconsiders itself rather than become a redundant drum beating throughout. A collection well worth picking up and digging into.
"When you walked through the door, I knew. Our eyes met, and it was the reverse of the first time our eyes met, strangers. Our eyes met, and I knew you'd forgotten our baby. She wasn't across town with your mom or out of sight in her swing. She was somewhere else, in the wide world without us. You gasped as if drowning and raced out the door."
That's a paragraph that packs in so much about a relationship, its crumbling, and we are still in the early throes of the story. Later in this collection, we find a string of connected stories that didn't hold as much impact for me, but overall there are a lot of strengths to this collection, especially a theme of sickness that turns around and reconsiders itself rather than become a redundant drum beating throughout. A collection well worth picking up and digging into.
April 21, 2016
Truly innovative, this collection is a collaboration between three highly accomplished writers. These loosely linked stories are quirky and pleasing and contain some of the best representations of mothers I have seen in a long time. If you're searching for something original yet accessible, this is it.
February 19, 2016
3.5 Stars
Your Sick is an uneven book. It has enough weak and forgettable stories to keep it from being a complete success. However, the good stories are good enough that it's still worth picking up.
Full Review
Your Sick is an uneven book. It has enough weak and forgettable stories to keep it from being a complete success. However, the good stories are good enough that it's still worth picking up.
Full Review
June 1, 2016
Fantastic. Original. Loved this very much.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews