Burning Girls and Other Stories

By: Veronica Schanoes

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

When we came to America, we brought anger and socialism and hunger. We also brought our demons.

In Burning Girls and Other Stories, Veronica Schanoes crosses borders and genres with stories of fierce women at the margins of society burning their way toward the center. This debut collection introduces listeners to a fantasist in the vein of Karen Russell and Kelly Link, with a voice all her own.

Emma Goldman - yes, that Emma Goldman - takes tea with the Baba Yaga and truths unfold inside of exquisitely crafted lies. In "Among the Thorns", a young woman in 17th-century Germany is intent on avenging the brutal murder of her peddler father but discovers that vengeance may consume all that it touches. In the showstopping, awards-finalist title story, "Burning Girls", Schanoes invests the immigrant narrative with a fearsome fairy-tale quality that tells a story about America we may not want - but need - to hear.

Dreamy, dangerous, and precise, with the weight of the very oldest tales we tell, Burning Girls and Other Stories introduces a writer pushing the boundaries of both fantasy and contemporary fiction.

©2021 Veronica Schanoes (P)2021 Tantor

Narrator couldn't pronounce foreign words

Nothing is more irritating than a narrator who doesn't prepare beforehand. Veronica Schanoes' tales are a mix of the old world and the new. There are witches and demons alongside antisemitism and unionism. It's a wonderful collection of stories but the narrator took me out of the stories several times as it was obvious that she was not prepared for Yiddish in the text. I might forgive someone who can't master a guttural H and pronounces Tuchas as Took-ass, but the word bubbe has two acceptable pronunciations: you can pronounce it as buh-bee to approximate love me, or bue-be to approximate cookie. Unfortunately, Cassandra Campbell chooses boo-bay like hurray. Bubbe is a major character in Burning Girls and other bubbes show up here and there and it made the tales unlistenable