Days of Awe: Stories
By A.M. Homes
(Viking)
With Days of Awe, writer A.M. Homes returns to the style that first launched her career: satirical fiction that casts a critical eye at suburban America and the status quo. This fresh batch of stories, however, is more surreal than Homes’ earlier work, and often drifts into magical realism. In the collection’s strongest work, the title story, a novelist and a war reporter meet at a conference on genocide and embark on an affair imbued with death, grief, and violence as they use each other’s bodies to make sense of the pain that they have not fully processed. In another tale, a family embarks on a shopping competition in a giant warehouse store and returns home with a new baby found on the store shelves.
The more dominant Homes’ magical themes become, the less time she seems to spend plumbing her characters’ depths. In this way, she loses some of the motivation, insight, and relatability her work has displayed in the past. Nonetheless, there is still plenty to like in this collection. And fans of Homes’ prior work will still find this to be a welcome return. 4/5
By Adrienne Urbanski
Days of Awe was released June 5, 2018
This article originally appeared in the October/November 2018 print edition of BUST Magazine. Subscribe today!
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