Fantasy Short Story Review: "The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club" by Nike Sulway

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This impressionistic story opens with lines from The Rhinoceros Sutra, something, frankly I’d never heard of: Two bright bangles on an arm clang, a single bangle is silence, wander alone like a rhinoceros. Clara, a divorced middle-aged women takes a creative writing workshop from Karen Joy Fowler and writes a story in the tradition of Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations.” Hers is titled “False Equations.” Karen Joy Fowler doesn’t read it. Other members of her book club don’t read it. But then, they don’t read the books for the book club. Nor does Clara. In fact, the book club doesn’t quite get around to meeting. Karen Joy Fowler is a real person, the author of a book titled The Jane Austen Book Club. However, Clara meets Belle through the workshop and the two become good friends. Clara’s daughter Alice, is childless. She takes care of other people’s children. Her husband gets sick and dies. Notice a pattern here? It’s a rather difficult, but everyone is alone. That doesn’t make them meaningless. When people are portrayed at their most intimate, they are said to use horns. At other times, they have folds in their skins. While the writing is impressionistic and nice, there’s often feeling of great indecisiveness on the part of Clara I personally found annoying. Clara isn’t an adolescent fretting about getting asked to a homecoming dance. As Clara comes down the shared driveway to Alice’s house, she always experiences a moment of something like regret, or fear. What if, once she enters daughter’s house, she isn’t able to leave again? What if, once she sees all the children her daughter cares for, she can’t stop herself from saying something cruel? Telling her daughter what she believes: that Alice’s house full of other people’s children is just a way for her daughter to endlessly delay her own grieving, her own letting go of things. Or what if the opposite occurs: What if she enters that house full of children, sees all the work that needs to be done caring for them, and is caught up in her daughter’s Sisyphean task of feeding, bathing, and holding other creatures’ young? Like Sisyphus forever pushing his stone up the same mountain, only to watch it roll down again. Nevertheless, this is a thoughtful story on middle age, life and death, with some fantasy elements in it. It’s not for everyone. Clara has a little epiphany at the end, but it seems a long time coming. According to the author’s blurb, Nike Sulway hails from Queensland and is the author of Rupetta, The Bone Flute, and The True Green of Hope. She is a lecturer in creative writing in Southern Queensland University. The text is available here: _____ Title: “The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club” Author: Nike Sulway Published in: The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 First Published: Lightspeed October 2015