Carmen Maria Machado is a talented writer, but her favored structures and motifs do not mesh with mine. At the prose level, I appreciated this collection of short stories. And I was interested in several of its themes, but dismayed by others. I'll lay out my thoughts story by story and then provide my general thoughts in more depth at the end. The Husband Stitch- ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ I'm not hiding it. It just isn't yours. While I think this could have been expanded upon more cleverly,

A lover? Maybe. Something tender, anyway. But tender like a bruise. It was worth it completing the whole series, but this installment was a lot clunkier than the rest. Even though this book dragged at points, I actually think it could have benefitted from being longer , or split into two. Because the reason it dragged was not that the plot wasn't exciting—it's that it wasn't developed. It felt like much too short an amount of time to accomplish a convincing prison camp, amnes