Book Reviews
What Happens When an Unstoppable Force Meets an Immovable Object?
check it out here
BOOK REVIEW
six months, three days
found in Even Greater mistakes
by charlie jane anders
Short Story List
- As Good As New
- Rat Catcher’s Yellow
- If You Take my Meaning
- The Time Travel Club
- Six Months, Three Days
- Love Might Be Too Strong a Word
- Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie
- Ghost Champagne
- My Breath is a Rudder
- Power Couple
- Rock Manning Goes For Broke
- Because Change Was The Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy
- Captain Roger in Heaven
- Clover
- This is Why We Can’t Have Nasty Things
- A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime
- The Bookstore At The End of America
- The Visitmothers
Six Months, Three Days
WHAT IT IS ABOUT?
Doug and Judy have both had a secret power all their life. Judy can see every possible future, branching out from each moment like infinite trees. Doug can also see the future, but for him, it’s a single, locked-in, inexorable sequence of foreordained events. They can’t both be right, but over and over again, they are.
Obviously these are the last two people in the world who should date. So, naturally, they do
REVIEW
Charlie Jane Anders is a writer that I discovered last year and immediately fell in love with. I enjoyed The City in the Middle of the Night, and I had to investigate all the other things she has written as a matter of course. I am so glad I did. Anders is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning writer and a Hugo nominated fancaster with her partner Annalee Newitz. You can find her excellent podcast here. I bought a hardback copy of her short stories after checking out and reviewing As Good As New. Now, she has a new book of short stories coming out called Even Greater Mistakes.
As Good As New exudes pure positivity even in the face of tragic or exhausting circumstances. It is a quality that I find quite a bit in Anders’s writing. She has a way of finding the good, the beautiful, the heartfelt in places where finding those things is hard. Even in the direst of circumstances, there is always good and always something beautiful even if you can’t see it, and Anders calls it out; she shows us.
“Well,” Judy says. “There are a million tracks, you know. It’s like raindrops falling into a cistern, they’re separate until they hit the surface, and then they become the past: all undifferentiated. But there are an awful lot of futures where you and I date for about six months.”―
There are many wonderful short stories in Even Greater Mistakes. Six Months and Five days is short story with the same sense sense of optimism that I have come to associate with Anders.
Six Months and Three Days is a love story, of a sort. It is an exploration of what happens when two individuals, one who can see his future, and another who can see all futures meet and fall in love? It is a literal definition of a rock and a hard place.
The story is charming, and we know right from the beginning how it is going to end. But, the ending is not important. It doesn’t matter how Doug and Judy end up getting there; it is the six months and three days of life that happen before the final moment, which I think Anders wanted to highlight.
Yes, we can know all the answers. Yes, we know there will be lots of pain in this relationship. Yes, we know exactly how it is going to end. However, there are many beautiful moments, moments of love, and life that are worth celebrating even if you have already seen them in your mind’s eye; you haven’t experienced them.
The juice is worth the squeeze!
Check out the full story collection, but read Six Months and Three Days for sure.
Check Out some of our other reviews
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55 Books With LGBTQIAP+ Representation to Add to Your TBR
Beth Tabler
Elizabeth Tabler runs Beforewegoblog and is constantly immersed in fantasy stories. She was at one time an architect but divides her time now between her family in Portland, Oregon, and as many book worlds as she can get her hands on. She is also a huge fan of Self Published fantasy and is on Team Qwillery as a judge for SPFBO5. You will find her with a coffee in one hand and her iPad in the other. Find her on: Goodreads / Instagram / Pinterest / Twitter
I read All the Birds in the Sky a few years ago & had mixed thoughts about the structure but loved the originality. Time to try another one I think!
If you read any story, read the short story about the genie in the bottle. It is short and lovely. It is a “light in the darkness” type story.