The first time I read The Bog Girl, I was disappointed by the ending, but after the comments I came around to it (I loved the setup from the time I sat down to read it). Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master. I’m excited about Orange World, though, because I really enjoyed grappling with the last thing I read by Russell, The Bog Girl, published in 2016 (see the post here). The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void–yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. In the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. In “The Prospectors,” two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. In”Bog Girl”, a revelatory story about first love, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. Karen Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner in lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. A version of this article appears in print on, of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Love at First Sight and Other Disasters.
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