🦩BOOK REVIEW 🦩

Synopsis: In her debut short story collection, Laura Chow Reeve seizes the familiar Florida landscape of postcards and headlines—and pries open spaces for unlikely affection and sun-soaked eeriness. A pair of queer friends make themselves at home on the banks of the Suwannee River. A family tragedy unfolds at Disney World. A hurricane floods a theater during an apocalyptic movie marathon. A flamingo meets an untimely end at the Jacksonville Zoo. A relationship falters, only in part due to one partner transforming into a reptile. Characters weave in and out of this collection’s fourteen stories, finding moments of intimacy with ghosts and moments of alienation from loved ones.
A Small Apocalypse is a gorgeously wrought exploration of what it means to exist in the in-between. Heavily steeped in the swampy, feral heat of Florida, its stories plum the joys and dissonances of queerness, hybridity, Asian American identity, and cultural inheritance, with an eye for both the uncanny and the nakedly true.

Review:
• Milked Snakes - While I loved the idea, it unfortunately was very similar to a novel I read last year called Shark Heart, and when comparing a short story to a full novel, Milked Snakes really did not compare.
• One Thousand Year Old Ghosts - it is at this point I realise the author has an incredible talent for writing and a very creative mind, there is no doubt about it that.
• Bodies - Loved it!
• Suwanee - at this point, approximately 34% I’ve DNFed. It’s very clear the author has an incredible talent, but this book is not the right book for me right now. I need to revisit it in a different headspace. But the queer representation is sensational and consistent throughout. I wish I had known that characters in earlier stories would reappear in future stories, as I read each story independently and spaced apart, so once they reappeared, I had forgotten who was who, and all their details. Hence why I need to revisit it again and read it cover to cover.
Highly recommend! Especially for queer folk.

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I picked this completely at random because it sounded interesting and it did exactly what it said on the tin.
I loved this read. I was only two stories in and knew I’d be ordering a physical copy.
Literally every story had purpose and I’m left with so many things to think about and that I’m desperate to discuss with someone. I’ll be making sure my friends read it so that I can share my think pieces with them 😂

Absolutely stellar collection, I recommend it!

A Small Apocalypse is a collection of short stories exploring otherness and belonging set in Florida. The characters weave in out and of the stories, intersecting at different moments in time. The writing was straightforward and the storytelling was unique and clever. I would have loved to go more in depth with these characters in a novel rather than short stories.

Thank you to NetGalley for an Advanced Reader Copy in exchange for my honest review. A Small Apocalypse comes out on March 15th, 2024.

Throughout this collection of short stories, author Laura Chow Reeve returns again and again to themes of queerness, Asian American experience, and in between spaces. The thing I was struck with, repeatedly, was a sense of discomfort or unease. Somehow (to the author’s credit), this was not an inherently bad thing.

Balmy Florida was the backdrop for many of the stories, interwoven with characters familiar and strange. A deeply unsettling read, that is so worth the journey.

The author did a little more showing than I think I would have preferred, but I liked all the ways of looking at “apocalypse” and Queerness here.

I really enjoy short story collections, whether it is a showcase for individual authors coming together or the versatility of one author to write divers stories on different topics, themes and styles, a compendium is always a good quick read

The best part about A Small Apocalypse, is that it is not just a compendium of stories. The characters snake through each story, coming and going as if they were normal interactions on a daily basis in the real world. Laura Chow Reeve is artful in weaving the narrative and structuring the interconnectivity between her characters that is authentic and in no way contrived

This is very much a compendium for our time based on its diversity and relevancy and it is simply brilliantly written. In time it will be recorded as a great piece of observational and speculative literature

Thank you to Netgalley, Northwestern University Press, TriQuarterly and the author Laura Chow Reeve for this absolutely stunning ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own

*ad-pr: I received a gifted copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.*

A short story collection with lots of LGBTQIA representation, exploring themes of friendship, grief, relationships and race. Every single story drew me in from the offset, and I was captivated by the well-written characters and the mix of everyday lives and more surreal plot lines.

The story ‘Happiest’ has absolutely broken me and I don’t think I’ll ever quite recover from what happened within it. I also loved the interconnected stories about the friendship group, and how they were each touched by the death of their close friend.

I sometimes find short story collections a bit hit and miss, but these were all hits for me and I was throughly engaged throughout. This is a brilliant collection, which builds relationships, develops characters and evokes a strong sense of place within a small number of pages. I’d definitely recommend it!

a queer short story collection that focuses on FLORIDA. i am very into short stories, and reeve did a wonderful job. i enjoyed reading about these people and their relationships.

A Small Apocalypse by Laura Chow Reeve is filled with tales I’ll be thinking about for a while. Weaving threads through the Florida heat, damaged apartments, secret parties, relationships ending and beginning, I never knew exactly where the thread was taking us but I was glad to be along for the ride.

An excellent short story collection where the stories are connected by Florida, relationships, race and queerness.

Laura Chow Reeve is a talented writer and I hope that one of these stories evolve to a longer story at some point in the future.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review.

A Small Apocalypse is a collection of short stories, many of them with interweaving characters, exploring both uncanny situations and everyday queerness. Memorable individual stories tell tales of people turning into reptiles and tragedy at Disney World, whilst a group of queer friends in Florida form the basis of many of the stories, exploring ghosts and alienation and a dead flamingo. Themes that run throughout the collection are swampy Florida, Asian American experience, queerness, and unsettling moments.

As someone who isn't always a huge fan of short story collections, I was drawn to the blurb of this one, particularly the queerness and mention of something bad happening at Disney World, and I'm so glad I was. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed both the standalone stories and the ones which featured recurring characters, and the two types of story interweave in the book like you never know what might recur and what won't, which I found an extension of the slightly unsettling vibe of some of the stories. I did love the Disney theme park story, both in its execution and in the story it tells, and I also really liked a lot of the more mundane stories that focused on character, relationships, and place, that place mostly being Florida. I appreciated how much even the interconnected stories were very different, offering some building blocks from other stories but also being their own thing.

If you're looking for short stories that come together as a collection, that explore queerness, race, place, relationships, and fears in ways that are both everyday and weird, then A Small Apocalypse is well worth a read. It made me feel refreshed by the idea of short stories and what it means to read a collection of them by an author.

A brilliant short story collection. I went into reading this book having not heard of it or of the author and was really blown away by the writing and the creativity within each story. It's the kind of book I describe as "weird and wonderful". Where you just cannot know what it is going to happen next. Girl turning into a snake? Check. People aren't who they seem? Check. Cows who can talk on planet Mars? Not yet but could easily turn the page and find it... and it would be brilliantly written too.

A gorgeous short story collection, doubly enjoyed by me as many of the stories take place in the city I live in! Reeve is a force to be reckoned with.

This collection of short stories is one I will be thinking about for a long time. It weaves the queer experience through a collection of friends. These stories intertwine masterfully throughout the book and really sit with you in a way I haven't experienced often in a book. The predominant location is set in Florida which is a very important setting in regards to the characters. I loved this book so much and highly recommend everyone takes the time to pick this one up.


Thank you to the publisher Northwestern Publishing for providing an ARC via Net Galley!

"A Small Apocalypse" is a gorgeous and highly atmospheric queer read. I have not read anything quite like it. Once I finished the first story I realized I could trust the author to weave characters, climate, and connections in intriguing and clever ways. Highly recommended. Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. #SmallApocalypse

Super intriguing read - I really liked the connections that flowed between the stories within the characters and their respective plots. I found the setting to be profoundly present in each of the stories, whether it was a main character or not, the sense of place was always the driving force in the story. Beautiful and haunting would be the words I use to describe these stories.