Moonflower in Autumn Rain

by Ilish Stone

A daring collection of surreal, lonely and sentimental fiction.

Moonflower in Autumn Rain is a deeply poetic, and at once, tragically mundane—microscopic look at the uncertain reality of human longing.

Part science fiction, part romantic mystery, and a dash of the Japanese I-Novel style of writing, here lies a reality where characters long for, and often fail in securing an answer to their loneliness and alienation, resorting to odd means: such as traveling to another, incredibly similar world; believing the ocean stole their father; or sailing a ship to play the violin on a moonlit sea.

The narratives are quiet, but surrealistic and colorful in how the scenery and people blend together to reflect unspoken layers of character. Each story—while separate, serves as a mirror version of the core struggle to carve meaning where the ability to belong with others has been lost. Similar characters find each other time and time again, only for new hidden desires and long-forgotten, somehow beautiful emotions to reveal themselves.

Genres: Magical Realism, Fantasy, Poetry, Short Stories

190 pages, Paperback

Published April 22, 2019

About the author

Ilish Stone (James Ilish Sanchez) was born in the naval base of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This site would later be home to one of the most notorious United States prisons to ever exist. After migrating, much of his life was devoted to forming peace with a tragic version of the city that enticed Pulitzer Prize poet William Carlos Williams: Paterson, New Jersey.

Author, researcher, poet, and fiction writer, Ilish Stone currently attends the anthropology department of Montclair State University and is the recent recipient of the 2019 Antoinette C. Bigel Award for a linguistic study on silence. A postmodern magical realism writer, Ilish Stone lives to identify with the passing, ordinary beauties that at once go by.

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.77 "surreal, descriptive, very hard to connect to" stars !!!

My thanks to BookSirens and the author for an e-book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a very challenging book to review and rate. I appreciated the poetic surreal prose but it was full of cleverness, steeped in self-consciousness and artistic name-dropping that cheapened the effectiveness of the meandering presentness.

There were four short stories (with short associated poetry) as well as a short novella (and one associated poem). I weighted the poems with one point, the short stories with two points and the novella with three points and then divided the total to get the overall book rating.

I will rate each story with a brief impression but the very short poems I will just rate.

1. The antonym of flower is mind (2 stars) pretty sentences strung together in a semi-pretentious manner

Datura(moonflower) (3 stars)

A Harmonica's passing (3 stars)

No Longer Human (4 stars)

2. Origami Airplane (3 stars) somewhat sci-fi and surreal....a lost brother and a semi-alien young woman

1999 (2.5 stars)

Fulfillment (2 stars)

Sunflowers bloom in the dark (3 stars)

3. A silent anemone (3.5 stars) A tender friendship between a deaf girl and an alien boy from Venus

Dogwood and the old me (4 stars)

The Alien Man Vanished (2 stars)

A family of turtles (2 stars)

4. Blue Hydrangea (2 stars) a string of beautiful sentences that did not work at all for me

Lemon (3 stars)

Monster (3 stars)

11.26.11 (2.5 stars)

5. Novella- Violet Amandrea (2.5 stars) a somewhat bizarre and surreal love story that again does not really work for me and I had a great deal connecting to

Moon on the Water (4 stars)

As you can see I deemed three of the poems as excellent (4 stars) ! The rest was a very mixed bag of experimental poetry and prose. A challenging read that I pushed through.

[Dana Cristiana · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 stars

I can't finish this. It's nothing wrong with the book, but it pushes me into a severe reading slump. I tried to do it, I really did. I've read 99 pages out of 190.

If you like anthologies, poetry and weird stories, go for it. I think I need to stick with actual novels for a while, though.

[Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone familiar with the style of the Japanese Watakushi (i-novel) genre in literature will know what they're getting themselves into with this collection. It's dreamlike and unstructured, and tends to explore dark themes such as isolation, depression, and a feeling of emptiness. This reminds me of Haruki Murakami's "After the Quake" collection - eclectic, poignant, sad, and sometimes downright nuts. It's not for everyone, that's for sure.

If you are feeling kind of deep and dark and up for a journey in surrealism where you can't quite be sure what's real or not, read this collection. If you're a fan of Haruki Murakami, read this collection. But if you need a structured story, don't. This will drop you flat on your ass if you think you're going to come away from any of the stories or poems with a resolution or even an understanding of "wtf was all that?" I found that unknowing beautiful. You might find it frustrating.

Thank you to Ilish Stone and BookSirens for providing me with an advance review copy for free. I am leaving this honest review voluntarily.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a hard collection to rate because I honestly feel that if I had encountered a single one of these stories on their own - say in a mixed author anthology - each would have been a stand out tale. However, all together, the stories quickly blended together. They are distinct in what happens, but the main character and the love interest are the exact same two people in all five stories - even changing the gender in one story had no effect.

Stone excels in writing magical realism and his imagery is great. It is extremely weird, but it is also extremely effective. I had no problem picturing the scenes and empathizing with the feelings Stone was describing. But I did have trouble picturing the people these scenes and feelings were supposed to be about.

As for the poetry parts - none of them were bad, but all of them felt flat to me. Initially I liked the idea of writing short stories and then following each one up with poems about said story, but in practice I don`t think it worked. Reading the story first made it impossible for the poems to stand on their own. Instead they just felt like they were 1) summarizing the story and 2) had already been interpreted for me by having a story explaining them first.

The bottom line: I`m not ravenous to read Stone`s next work, but I wouldn't say no to doing so either.

I was given a free copy of this book via BookSirens in return for an honest review.

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a collection of writing by earnest, young poet, Ilish Stone. The trappings seem quite Asian, from the graphic sumi-e strokes and cherry blossom petals embellishing a couple of the stories, to the artists and authors like Dazai and Murakami name-dropped throughout. But the story settings defy geographical placement, they could take place in New Jersey or Mars. The poems that follow each story seem to be unique in nature, not following any particular style like a tanka, renga, haikai, renku, hokku, or haiku.

I don't know if it was intentional or not, but I liked the flow of contradictions, like "A low-hanging light spilled over the edge of my bed. Heavy darkness blanketed the room. Past my table, small white circles shone in from the window." I was also intrigued by the consistent theme of skin issues experienced by so many of the characters: skin withering; skin turning sallow; toes being wrinkly and dry looking; skin turning hard, brittle; your skin is dry and mine is hard; dust gathers on my arms; the ashy skin at the joint.

I received an advanced review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Anomaly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Have you ever found yourself sucked into the first part of a book, only to end up sorely disappointed, counting the pages left in each chapter as you debate with your inner need to complete each book you start? If so, you'll understand what I mean when I say this book exhausted me. I'm not sure if it's the writing style which stops to excessively describe scenery in the middle of nearly every thought or if it's the abundant grammar issues and typographical errors, but something about this book made me feel like I was struggling to make sense of each story's flow and events - often just to be highly disappointed by the story's outcome regardless.

Now, don't get me wrong: I understand there's a level of surrealism in this book. I understand that it's not supposed to be happy stories or something for a pick-me-up. I'm not expecting utter realism or jovial prose. I am, however, exhausted by the twisting contradictions and abandoned/neglected plot threads and excess attempts to paint mental pictures of irrelevant scenery. It's dreamlike, sure, but for me it feels more like a fever dream, and I don't believe that surrealism should be an excuse for leaving abandoned plot threads at every turn. And it certainly is no excuse for all the characters sounding the same and the two main characters in each having the same personalities.

This book also relies heavily on namedropping songs (only one of which - Nirvana's 'Heart Shaped Box' - I actually recognized) and other books, which quite often takes away from both the narrative in general and the sense of dreamlike flow. The quotes from other books tend to work into each story in such a way that some of the stories try to make poignant ties to them... only to fall incredibly flat and feel very forced. The narrative surroundings of the book quotes assume that everyone gathers the same thing from every book, and often don't really fit into context.

It's as if all the characters just live within their own heads, ready to quote random literary works when not really relevant to the outside world. I found it frustrating, as quite often the quotes were nonsensical out of the original context and just made characters come across as insane or incapable of understanding the meaning of English words.

Because this book is separated into stories, I'll be reviewing each one individually - without any significant spoilers, though honestly I'm not sure I understand what happened well enough to give spoilers for some of them anyway. Like I said: it feels as if I've just lived through a series of fever dreams.

***

The book starts with a preface wherein the author waxes poetic about why he wanted to write this book and why he structured it as he did. I can relate quite a bit when it comes to wanting to explain and justify one's own writing, but there's always the risk of sounding pretentious and the intro here comes dangerously close to crossing that line. Within the preface, the author claims his stories are character-driven, but I found that there was very little driving and more attention to scenery than people in many areas. I usually love character exploration, so I was surprised I didn't like this collection more.

***

"The Antonym of Flower is Wind" is about... uhm. Well, there's a girl involved? And some people? But maybe there isn't? And maybe there is?

Frankly, I don't even know what to say about this one. It feels as if the author didn't actually know where this one was heading while writing it. There either is or isn't a lost friend or lover. There either is or isn't something supernatural happening. There either is or isn't something psychological happening. I'm not just being vague to avoid spoilers; I'm being vague because this story gives literally no answers while hinting at all kinds of things.

Overal, it drew me in from the beginning but lost me once things became confusingly contradictory. Especially when poetry suddenly popped up, it just came across as pretentious. There's potential for a great story at first, and I'm disappointed it fell apart so quickly. (Note that poetry popping up at the end of each story is something we're warned of in the preface, but this poetry has no logical flow and the ending was so abrupt in the first tale that it honestly felt that the poetic piece was in the middle.)

***

Next in line, "Origami Airplane" has a lot of confusing points. It suffers from poor grammar and typographical errors and gets bogged down by frequent asides to explain unnecessary visual elements. The story itself also has basically nothing to do with origami or airplanes, except for maybe two mentions of something which is neither origami or a plane vaguely resembling them. It isn't the point of the story, which... well, it tries to be science fiction, but in an extremely weird manner which starts out feeling like a personal drama or criminal mystery and leaves all the questions you'd ask about those elements unanswered except with a vague 'maybe' of a hint.

Ultimately, the original draw of the story as a mystery falls completely flat, seeming more like an aside despite the impact it SHOULD have in so-called character driven fiction, and the science fiction (perhaps even paranormal; it's very difficult to decide) element leaves much to be desired. The ending poetry once again didn't impress me; it had no flow and felt very shallow despite clearly attempting to have depth related to the story preceding it.

***

"A Silent Anemone" seems to keep running with the established theme of not knowing whether to be paranormal or mundane. Is there a crazy person? Or is there an alien? Is there a deaf girl? Or is there a mentally ill girl? These questions, at times, get answered... only to have contradictory evidence surface later, and then contradictions to that wash up again and suggest the original answers were more accurate - rinse and repeat. It's almost like the rise and fall of the tides, and in that way this story ALMOST works. Were the ending better and the story itself not a minefield of sloppy grammar, I think I would have liked this one. The poetry at the end is not as grating as after previous stories, either.

I would also like to add that, while I'm not a fan of the way it's handled in certain places - which is more about the writing style than the content, I think - I'm glad to see that the story includes a semi-realistic depiction of what it's like to be hard of hearing yet mistaken for completely deaf.

***

"Blue Hydrangea" is... peculiar. It's difficult to follow what's being alluded to at the beginning, though I think that may be intentional. (At first, I thought the emotions being described were surrounding a violation - a rape or something of that sort - but those with triggers in that regard can rest assured that I was wrong.) With grammatical gymnastics such as "Its long neck—the pale cup at the end scooped out me out: all the leftover parts." it comes across more as someone ATTEMPTING to be deep than someone actually being deep. This one also suffers more than the other stories from the overuse of other works to prop its narrative. In example: "Every fleck of rain, I felt, like the moonlight in Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, were blind cancer cells. Spreading out over my house, trying to find their way to me." Why even include this? Either say every drop/fleck of rain felt like a spreading cancer or say something else if that particular phrase has you worried about seeming unoriginal. Tossing in the name of the work you originally heard it from doesn't actually make the reference any more your own or any less unoriginal.

This story, however, does strike a bit of a chord with me in how it depicts the mind wandering in a depression after a loved one's death. It feels like the most real, the closest to actually being a surrealistic story of longing and loss. As such, it didn't exhaust me as much to read through it and I found myself eagerly flipping through the pages even as I took notes about grammatical issues and overuse of (not-so-) popular culture references. In the case of this story, some of the musical references are actually relevant, so I'd say it gets a pass on those anyway.

On the flip side, it's just TOO MUCH surrealism for a story which is otherwise focused on mundane and (for a change) non-paranormal events. There's a big difference between saying that something feels as if [insert surreal body horror here] and just flat-out stating it as if the thing happened and nobody around noticed and the narrator went around searching for the missing body parts afterward. I don't think the author knows quite how to balance the difference between the two, and it makes for some very confusing moments where the narrative outright lies to the reader and forces a re-read just to process what's real and what isn't. (Like a fever dream. All of these stories, so much like fever dreams...)

Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but this tale struck me more as a lost love than a lost friend. There are elements I won't share for the sake of not spoiling which come across very, very much as if they're moments between lovers and not just friends. The way the poems refer to the lost friend after the story ends feel more like fleeting glimpses of a love wanted yet not pursued. Oddly, I think despite the gripes I had with it, I liked this particular story and the poetry which followed - even if I did grow annoyed at the repetition of words in the final poem.

***

Next up is "Violet Amandrea," a novella. I stalled on reading this one, knowing it'd be even longer than the ones before it and likely require even more mental energy. I must have read the first two parts thrice each before I felt I even had a vague sense of what was happening, and I do mean TRULY VAGUE. Eventually, I gave up and just kept going in the hopes it'd eventually start making sense.

The fact a wet shirt is described as searing skin on a night which was just described as unseasonably cold should explain how confusing and nonsensical this one is in places. You know, searing, which means to heat up or burn. It's summer in the story, so there's no way it's cold enough for wetness to cause a freezerburn effect.

As the novella goes on, things get slightly - and I do mean SLIGHTLY - more coherent in places. It becomes the story of an insufferably annoying woman and the man who's creepily obsessed after seeing her only once, at least from what I can tell. I didn't feel a connection to any of the characters, and honestly wanted to reach through the pages to smack both the guy and the girl at least twice each. There's also an unsettlingly creepy teacher and the same voice being used for all the characters. (As in: you really can't tell who's saying what until it's indicated because everyone has the same - or highly similar - verbal ticks and vocabulary.)

The story is... odd, confusing. I suppose maybe it's a love story, but about people who are kind of, well, odd. If they're even 'real' (within the narrative; they're obviously fictional in terms of the real world). Very much was lost to the overuse of painting titles, song names, band names, etc. Instead of saying "there's a flowery painting" - or whatever kind of painting it may be - hanging as a poster on the wall, it names the artist and the painting's title. Instead of saying there's synth-pop, indie acoustic, dubstep, whatever (I didn't know any of the songs so I have no clue what genres they were) playing, it names bands and song titles. I honestly don't even know if all of them were real, but some of the namedropped bands - like Joy Division - were. I often felt myself drawn out of the story and away from the tone that was being set because all I could do was sigh in frustration that I had no clue what music was supposed to be playing or what tone was therefore supposed to exist. I'm not going to go hunt down a son on Spotify or look for a painting on Wikipedia just to be able to understand a story, which is supposed to provide the entire mental image for me with the wordcrafting alone.

It's also of note that, while no other parts of this book contained sex, this portion does. It's out of the blue and kind of crude; it doesn't use the same, flowery, overly metaphorical prose that the rest of the book does. Now, before you think I'm just upset that it's sex, that's not the case; the inclusion doesn't offend me or anything like that, but the presentation does feel extremely out of place and oddly handled due to not being written in the same manner as surrounding paragraphs. The best way I can explain the disconnect is to imagine that you're at a fancy party with lords and ladies in the middle of a mansion ballroom. Suddenly, someone lets out a huge, resounding fart and yells afterward that they shouldn't have eaten food truck sushi. As if nothing has happened at all, the party carries on. A nice waltz begins, and the prince and princess join together to dance. A bystander farts again. The smell lingers, but you're the only one who seems to smell it. The party carries on around you as if nothing has happened at all - as if nobody in this very etiquette-driven gathering has noticed the faux pas.

By the end of this one, as I'd predicted, I felt very mentally exhausted and annoyed. I won't lie and say that there aren't intriguing and even good parts to it, but it definitely wasn't my cup of tea and the characters made me more annoyed than any other emotion. The ending felt a bit cheap, like the wrap-up of a Lifetime movie instead of the sort of ending I felt a tale like this one should have. Everything just seemed to be waved away or else tied up hastily with no true sense of resolution.

***

Overall, I suppose I can't say that I regret reading Moonflowers in Autumn Rain. I trudged through when it dragged and I experienced what feels like a somewhat psychedelic and intensely creepy fever dream in the form of words on digital pages. There's an odd sense of melancholy in me now, and I think that may very well have been the author's intent, so... I suppose I can't fault it too hard if it achieved the end goal.

This wasn't my cup of tea, and the surrealism was just too much at many points, but I'm hesitant to take away stars for that. Am I just someone who's too desperately in need for resolution and thus not the target audience? Am I someone who's too analytical and thus gets bogged down on trying to figure out what each piece of surrealistic imagery means and why it's there? Perhaps, yes. I believe so, in fact.

But I also think that, at times, the writing deviates from being surrealism and veers toward just plain confusing. That, coupled with the grammatical and wording errors, knock it down by at least one star in my mind. The overabundance of relying on others' works - songs, literary quotes, paintings - take it down one more star to three, for me. On Goodreads, that means "i liked it," which isn't exactly true, but on Amazon it's more negative than I think this book deserves. With a good bit of editing and a touch of reworking of plots to give characters more unique personalities, it could easily be a five-star book, so after much consideration I'm just not comfortable giving two stars (on Goodreads, that means "it's okay," which is far less negative than two stars on Amazon). I think a nice, middle-of-the-road three stars works.

***

Full disclosure: I received an advance review copy of this book through BookSirens. After reading, I decided to leave this review which contains my honest opinions and was not incentivized.

[Briar · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hate giving a one-star review but I really really didn’t enjoy this book. If I’d not requested it to review (for free) from Book Sirens, I absolutely would not have read past the first ‘story’.

Look, most of the things in this book are not stories. I have a pretty broad definition of what story is: ‘a series of events with meaning’ (thank you Lani Diane Rich!). You can fit a hell of a lot of things into that definition, from novels to TV series to textbooks. Ilish Stone, however, has managed to create a series of events without meaning.

Let’s take the first ‘story’ as an example. It consists of some guy wandering about and wittering on about how lonely he is. He is obsessed with a woman despite the fact that he hasn’t seen her for years and no longer knows anything about her or her life. But apparently he prefers to mope over his memories of her rather than do, like, anything else at all. And that’s it. There’s no investigation as to why he feels this way, and he makes no attempt to act or change things. This isn’t a story! Nothing changes! Nothing happens! You can’t even call it a character study because ‘loneliness’ appears to be the only character trait he has, and the only thing he does is be lonely.

The best story was the third, A Silent Anemone. Not only did the protagonist (incidentally the only woman protagonist) have an actual personality, but there was a vaguely discernable story to it. Actual change happened and there was a little character development. The events had meaning! Sadly it’s the only one. Even the novella at the end, (which the author explains he wanted to write so as to explore the character more) just had more irrelevant, tedious descriptions breaking up the events so as to make them even less intelligible. And if you need to explain what you’ve done, you’ve probably done it badly.

Also, except for #3, all of the women are manic pixie dream girls. As the TV Tropes page puts it, “Let's say you're a soulful, brooding male hero, living a sheltered, emotionless existence. If only someone could come along and open your heart to the great, wondrous adventure of life...” Ilish Stone’s women are textbook. One of them plays the violin in the snow. Twice. And on the subject of writing women, in the one story where the protagonist is a woman it’s incredibly noticeable that her male friend is not super hot. Just, if you’re a woman in a book written by a man, you’d better be hot or your life won’t be worth living. But if you’re an unhot dude you’re fine, the hot women will all be falling over themselves to shag you. Next please.

I guess I should mention the poems. They were not for me. Poetry is meant to tap directly into the emotions, bypass all that thinking. These just skittered off my brain and I barely even remember them. So there’s that.

Well, there you have it. I did not enjoy this book at all. I hesitate to call writing ‘bad’ because I’m sure it will appeal to some people. But don’t call a story a story when it’s not a story; that’s just annoying. I like the cover though.

See all my reviews on my blog https://thewearybookcase.home.blog/

[Cavak · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ray Bradbury had an amazing yarn he'd love to share with aspiring writers that goes something like this. He confessed embarrassment for his earliest works. Yes, they sold and he found early teenage success by getting them published.

Didn't matter. They weren't him.

All he was doing was copying the patterns and tones of his many inspirations. He just didn't know it at the time. Not until he really thought about it.

The first real story he wrote was pulled from his own life. His family often went to the beach when he was a boy, and he remembered with startling clarity a young lady in a pretty dress who took off her shoes before walking straight into the water. Nobody else in his family seemed aware of her. He never saw her come back to shore. And all that while, young Bradbury couldn't get his mind off her disappearance and her abandoned shoes.

Come about a decade later, while he's mulling about the blandness of his writing and the depressive slump he's in, and bam! Bradbury remembers that girl again. Just like that, he sought to write the conclusion real life never answered for him. And it was so moving an experience that he wept when he finished.

Because in that moment, it was like bringing her back to life. Being back at that beach. To know she was always more than whatever he saw. And it was a discovery of what it means to write what mattered to him alone. That's what it meant to him to find his voice.

So, I'm hoping Stone captures his own pair of missing shoes someday. Moonflower in Autumn Rain ain't it to me.

It takes practice. It takes humility. It takes time. And I'm hoping Stone believes in the imagery of his dreams enough to shape something that digs deeper. Something that dips into the core of himself. Something that kicks open the ego and shines into the soul.

I'll be looking forward to when that moment comes. Because I'll know it'll be an amazing work. The foundations are already there. Keep at it, yo.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Lily Wonka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
This is a story about people who don't fit.
The wording is very poetic albeit a little hard to follow at times. If you like to know what it's about when and where this isn't the book for you.
However, if you enjoy whimsical descriptions and plot twist that aren't necessarily explain go right ahead !
I loved getting into those stories without much details and just going with the flow, especially because the writing makes it so dream-like ! After all who needs to know all the names be it people's or places' and who needs to know if this happened before or after that ?
I especially enjoyed the story about a deaf girl who doesn't like people. There is one about a lost brother and a girl from a different earth, one about a girl that maybe doesn't exist, one about a funeral...
Don't expect to finish this read you might get to the last word but the stories continue !

[Jess]

Thank you to the author for providing me with an advance review copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Ilish Stone's book consists of several short stories and a poem at the end of each story. Stone writes with vivid imagination, descriptive imagery and the stories often seem set in a parallel universe.

For me the biggest problem I had with this book was that it was littered with grammatical errors and it did not seem to have been formatted correctly in order to be read as an e-book. A single sentence was often split across several lines, there were many spelling and tense mistakes. I feel at times that the book had not been proof-read and these errors distracted from the plot.

Whilst in some parts of the book there was very striking and immersive imagery, I felt that several of the stories jumped around a lot, it often seemed disjointed and like too many things were going on at once. I regularly had to re-read the last few pages to ensure I had not missed a part of it.

However there was one short story that I really enjoyed; "Part 2 - Second Departure", I found this to be the most immersive story, the one where the reader seemed to have more context and for me the characters really came to life. I also liked how Stone included a poem at the end of each story.

I feel that Stone has the foundation of a unique book here however there is still a lot editing and refining that needs to be done, I also feel that several of these short stories would have been better as one longer story in order to keep the confusion and chaos to a minimum.

[Neriah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of short stories followed poetry end. The stories have eerie, magical realism, surreal and raw melancholic touch to it. They range from failing to find closure to lost love; travelling to a parallel universe; believing that the ocean stole their father and a friend from venus and finally, my best pick: the story of a girl who is a sailor and wants to play the violin on a moonlit sea. Each short story is followed beautifully penned poem as an epilogue.

What I most admired about this book is that even though many things were left unsaid, it felt like I understood those depths but could not comprehend its true meaning. The stories too have a remarkable poetic touch: the description, the moments, the emotions etc flows like a poem. The eccentric themes are not relatable but their emotions are. There lies a feeling of lost, stuck in your thoughts and I felt that the stories are dejected from reality yet so close to it. That's what drew me to the stories! It turned out to be a good read even though the book screamed sadness and loneliness. Stone has done an applaudable job with this book as a writer!

Thank you Booksirens and Ilish Stone for providing me with a review copy.

[Gabriel Noel · Rating 4 out of 5]

ARC provided by BookSirens for Honest Review

Moonflower in Autumn Rain was an incredibly interesting read for me. Short stories paired with accompanying poems told lyrical and strange tales all told in first person. The stories boast intricate detail, and while in some it was slightly overwhelming, it envelops the reader in the richness of each story.

My personal favorite was "Blue Hydrangea" for it's take on human emotion and the dichotomy of darkness and light. Bonus points for those Kingdom Hearts references!

The overall theme to this collection is longing, human connection, and melancholy. Some of these stories may not have the stereotypical "happy ending" but I found all had some sort of hopeful and "look toward the future" ending.

[Lauren Mendez · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an eclectic, intriguing, and engaging collection of short stories including a novella. I found this work to be fascinating, particularly that every work included several poems providing insight into the work itself. The stories are not the same characters or interconnected, but all dive into questions surrounding human experiences. Themes presented included love, friendship, death, and how time can change so much and so little. There is some sexual content in the final work and overall the content feels appropriate for more mature readers. This work left me with many questions and a desire for more. I look forward to future works by this author. I received an ARC in exchange for my opinions and am leaving my honest review of the work.

[Andrea Stoeckel · Rating 2 out of 5]

“I believe that dreams are embedded in ordinary, everyday life; which is why every story included, no matter how imaginative, is still at its core a very human and mundane set of personal happenings.”

I wanted so badly to like this book that I received from Book Sirens in exchange for an honest review, but, it was actually painfully clear that that wouldn’t be the case. Written as a series of short stories and poetry, it comes across as creepy and made me very uncomfortable. Love, sex and death are discussed and written about, but it comes across as stream of consciousness rather than actually making much sense. As an elder, this book is just embarrassing, and I am open to many genres. I just wish Author Stone had actually landed on one I understood. I can’t recommend this.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

The stories in this book have a Murakami flavor. They're chock full of surrealities and straightforward descriptions of day-to-day habits, such as meals. My favorite story was the second, "Origami Airplane," for its weird and vivid characterization and imagery. The poetry added nothing to the collection, except maybe giving a peek into the author's process and mindset.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a beautifully written masterpiece. There was this subtle depth that I truly appreciated while all the emotions resonated to me loud and clear. It was magnificent! This is something I took my time to read and reflect on.