The OK End of Funny Town

March 1, 2020
Polanzak brings the same fabulist approach to each of these strange, playful stories. Many are highly conceptual, making fun of our society's determination to complicate, as in A Proper Hunger, which toys with the culinary world as people push past the farm-to-table trend into restaurants that involve choosing their chicken, then even hunting their own food. In Complicated and Annoying Little Robot, a person is frustrated with his nagging house-cleaning machine and wishes to return it but panics at the idea of it being destroyed; in Gracie, a man saves a lost dog without fully knowing why he must. Polanzak uses these uncanny aspects to get at deeper human emotions that are usually more difficult to define. The climax and soul of this collection is How You Wish, in which the narrator tells a love story by picking apart the different ways we wish on fountains, stars, eyelashes, birthday candles, and more. Polanzak's collection is rich and packed with visionary tales that are sure to entertain speculative fiction readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)