Let's Play White, by Chesya Burke
Title: Let's Play White
Series: Stand-alone
Author: Chesya Burke
Publisher: Apex Publications
Format: Trade Paperback
Year: 2011
Pages: 188
Genre: Horror
Subgenres: Dark Fantasy, Magical Realism
Challenge Information: Fantasy Challenge category "Read a novel dealing with race."
Full Disclosure: I received a free copy through the GoodReads First Reads program.
Jacket Description
Gritty and sublime, the stories of Let's Play White feature real people facing the worlds they're given, bringing out the best and the worst of what it means to be human. If you're ready to slip into someone else's skin for a while, then it's time to come play white.
My Review
This was an extremely uneven collection of short stories. The best of them were absolutely stunning, heart-wrenching and thought-provoking. The worst were clunky, unsubtle, and lost their power (for me at least) as a result. All of the stories had some sort of fantastic element; unfortunately, the fantastic element seemed more likely to weaken the story than strengthen it. Still, good and bad, it's a collection very much concerned with power dynamics within families, between men and women, between poor and rich (or sometimes only less-poor), and between blacks and whites; themes I am always interested in and happy to see explored in fiction.
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"Walter and the Three-Legged King" -- This starts as a straight piece of horror, about a poor man in a dirty apartment, who keeps spotting a rat that the building super insists isn't there. It succeeded in horrifying me; and then it went somewhere more political. The collection gets its title from this story, and I love the title; but the story itself doesn't do very much with the concept other than lay it out there. ★★★1/2
"Purse" -- This was my favorite story in the collection; I would not change a word of it. It's extremely short, so I can't really say anything about it without spoiling it, but it's visceral and gruesome and tragic. ★★★★★
"I Make People do Bad Things" -- And this was my second favorite story in the collection, a period piece about Madam St. Clair and the numbers racket in Harlem in the 1930s. Burke's character development shines in this one, and the horror is psychologically rather than fantastically rooted. (The fantastic element is pretty damn cool, though, and totally essential to the story.) My only objection was that it was structured as a flashback; I felt this was unnecessary and took some of the oomph out of the story. ★★★★
"The Unremembered" -- My least favorite story of the collection. It gives a magical explanation for a girl named Jeli's autism and is fierce on the subject of the Christian clergy's usefulness. Unfortunately, I found the message of the story entirely too heavy-handed, and while the two mothers' characters are well-drawn, that was not enough for me to enjoy this story. ★
"Chocolate Park" -- This story is, in some way I'm having trouble defining to myself, the rawest of the collection. The characters - a trio of sisters, an old woman, and a local thug living in the same inner city neighborhood - are ugliest to each other here, and there is power in that even though I don't particularly enjoy reading it. Unfortunately, it felt split to me; ugly though it was, I was invested in Ebony's thread and was not in Lady Black's; it made me wish Burke had gone a straight-realist route and forsworn the Lady Black character entirely. ★★1/2
"What She Saw When They Flew Away" -- This is another (relatively) straightforward story about loss, like "Purse." I don't think it worked as well, mostly because so much more is spelled out for the reader. However, the central image is absolutely haunting. ★★★
"He Who Takes the Pain Away" -- I must admit, I did not get this one. I could not tell if it was meant to be read as realism or allegory, whether the fantastical element was actually present or a hallucination. I wanted to like it, and its depiction of a cult of death was properly horrific, but without knowing how to read it I can't really assess whether I liked it or not. (Unratable)
"CUE: Change" -- I'm not really a zombie person. That said, there was an interesting twist on the zombies themselves that I wish had been explored more fully, and I thought the first-person narrator was very nicely (and subtly) drawn. ★★★★
"The Room Where Ben Disappeared" -- This is another one, like "I Make People Do Bad Things," where I wish Burke had used a different technique to tell her story. The first-person narrator grated on me in this story, and the fantastic element actually seemed to undercut the horror of the realism (like in "Chocolate Park"). He was the only white protagonist in the collection, and one of only two men, and he seemed. . . minor, forgettable compared to how memorable Burke's other protagonists are. But the piece of his past that he forgot. . . even with the fantastic element erasing the worst possible outcome, the stark realities of being black (and white, really) in the South made me want to scream. ★★★
"The Light of Cree" -- This story felt like a prologue; in fact, several of the stories felt like prologues (I assume that's what Delany meant in his blurb about "intriguingly open endings"). But this one more than the others -- it's about a girl who has just had her first period and discovers that she's different in more ways than that overnight. We see her realize that, and then the story ends, and I was left thinking "And then what happened?" (Particularly because Cree is no Jennifer Love Hewitt. . . and that's a good thing.) ★★1/2
"The Teachings and Redemption of Ms. Fannie Lou Mason" -- This is the biggest of the stories, both in pages and in scope. It spans quite a few years and miles, following the powerful titular character through several small Southern towns where she touched down lightly and left chaos in her wake. (No, not chaos; mess, certainly, but a cleaner mess than the one she walked into, if that makes any sense.) I think the story would have benefited from being even longer; there's enough here for a novel, at least. Part of the reason I wanted it to be longer is that it suffers from the same problem many of the stories do: over-exposition. But in this case the exposition was actually necessary for the story to get told, so while it annoyed me just as much as before, I have to admit it was justified. Also again, my favorite moment is a non-fantastic one; there is a single moment of epic tragedy, made all the more poignant because it's so personal, so small. The story itself was just okay for me, and would have been just okay even if it had been expanded; but that moment was awesome. ★★★★
My Rating
Overall Satisfaction: ★★★
Intellectual Satisfaction: ★★1/2
Emotional Satisfaction: ★★★1/2
Read this for: The atmosphere, the characters
Don't read this for: The prose
Bechdel Test: Pass
Johnson Test: Pass
Books I was reminded of: Shirley Jackson's short fiction.
Will I read more by this author? Maybe.