"All the gorgeously
crafted stories in Maureen McHugh's Mothers & Other Monsters
have in common a profound understanding of the intricacies of human
relationships, to which McHugh adds a touch of the fantastical.
But here the fantastical seems so normal, so part of our everyday
experience, that we simply accept McHugh's premises, odd as they
might be when you consider them independently of the tales themselves.
The adjective that best represents this collection is 'unsettling'.
How else to describe stories in which a young woman meets a man
she's attracted to at a dog obedience class and discovers that she
dreads introducing him to her dead brother ("In the Air");
"Ancestor Money," in which a bequest entices a woman to
leave her comfortable home in the afterlife for a visit to China;
or "Laika Comes Back Safe," the story of two teenagers
who are drawn together by the fact that both have unhappy home lives,
but whose friendship is doomed because one is a werewolf. Whether
it's alternative history that seems so real you start to question
your own knowledge of the past ("The Lincoln Train") or
a tale of the horrifying end of a utopian colony ("The Cost
To Be Wise"), McHugh shows that what many people might dismiss
initially as genre fiction can become transcendent in the right
hands.
I was so impressed by these stories that I immediately went back
and read McHugh's first novel, China Mountain Zhang, which
I had somehow missed, and enjoyed it thoroughly."
-- Nancy Pearl (Book Lust) on Morning Edition, "Books
for a Rainy Day"
"Unpredictable
and poetic work."
-- Cleveland
Plain Dealer (Recommended Summer Reading)
"[McHugh]
cherry-picks subtle magical or futuristic elements from the expansive
genre library."
-- Angle
"McHugh's prose
style is unique."
-- LEO
(Louisville Eccentric Observer)
"McHugh is
enormously talented.... [She] has a light touch, a gentle sense
of a humor, and a keen wit."
-- Strange
Horizons
"Passion and precision."
-- Locus
"There's not
a single story that isn't strong, and most are brilliant."
-- Ideomancer
"Clear, bright,
and honest."
-- New York Review of Science Fiction
"Each story
in this collection meditates in its own, odd way on the dynamics
of families and the vagaries of being human. "Ancestor Money""
considers the demands of the afterlife and the expectations of the
living; "The Lincoln Train" describes an alternate ending
to the U.S. Civil War, in which former slave owners are shipped
westward on crowded trains. "Nekropolis," the germ of
McHugh's novel of the same title, gives a slightly different flavor
to the origins of the story common to both versions. Other stories
occur in settings closer to the known world and the tensions of
families in it. In "Eight-Legged Story," a stepmother
comes to terms with being a replacement parent, and in "Frankenstein's
Daughter," a woman deals with the health problems of her daughter's
clone, while her teenage son tries to show off to his friends by
shoplifting. McHugh's stories are hauntingly beautiful, driven by
the difficult circumstances of their characters' lives -- slices
of life well worth reading and rereading."
-- Booklist
"The 13 stories
in McHugh's debut collection offer poignant and sometimes heartwrenching
explorations of personal relationships and their transformative
power. In "Presence," a woman helps her husband through
an experimental therapy for his Alzheimer's disease and, by the
story's end, is less his spouse than a nurturing mother to his developing
personality. "In the Air" bridges three generations with its account
of the different emotions a woman wrestles with as she anxiously
tracks her wandering senile mother and her rebellious teenage daughter
by means of biologically implanted homing devices. "Laika Comes
Back Safe" represents so believably the feelings two school
friends share about their lives in dysfunctional families that the
revelation that one occasionally transforms into a werewolf seems
entirely within the realm of possibility. Whether writing an alternate
Civil War history in "The Lincoln Train" or a tale of
extraterrestrial anthropology in "The Cost to Be Wise,"
McHugh (Nekropolis) relates her stories as slices of ordinary life
whose simplicity masks an emotional intensity more often found in
poetry. The universality of these tales should break them out to
the wider audience they deserve."
-- Publishers Weekly
"In this collection
of stories, Maureen F. McHugh explores the subject of technology
and identity, demonstrating that technology can only be a lens for
what defines us as human, that is, our intimate relationship with
the world around us and all the beings with whom we share that world.
It is not technology which transforms us into monsters, but the
danger of losing our sense of compassion toward ourselves and others
in the face of monstrous choices."
-- Greenman
Review
"Stories that
abjure future or alternate-history settings for a here-and-now (sometimes
problematically so) in which women, most of them mothers (though
again often problematically) seek to negotiate landscapes for which
their lives thus far have left them unprepared."
-- Tangent
Online
"Moving."
-- Shortform
Praise for
McHugh'sprevious books:
On Nekropolis:
- * "Exquisite."
-- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
- "This luminous
tale of forbidden love in a near-future Morocco explores
the evolution of human nature in a world where technology
has redefined the meaning of the word human. . . . Speculative
fiction at its best." -- Library Journal
- A New York Times
Notable Book
- A Book Sense 76 Pick
- Amazon Best of the
Year
On China Mountain Zhang:
- "McHugh's achievement
recalls the best work of Delany and Robinson without being
in the least derivative." -- New York Times
Notable Book
- Winner of the Tiptree,
Lambda, and Locus Awards.
On Mission Child:
- * "McHugh delivers
another astonishing, compulsively readable novel."–Booklist
(starred review)
- "Fans of Ursula
Le Guin will find much to admire in McHugh's intelligent,
carefully wrought novel of a world that is familiar yet
very alien." -- Publishers Weekly
- "Beautiful . .
. outstanding . . . McHugh is one of the finest U.S. fiction
writers working today." -- Minneapolis Star-Tribune
- "Emotionally compelling
. . . immensely satisfying . . . wonderfully structured
and beautifully achieved . . . a splendid science fiction
novel . . . McHugh makes an alien world and an imagined
society feel compellingly real, and uses this setting to
say something significant about being human." -- Cleveland
Plain Dealer
- "Mission Child
is an epic map of voice meeting voice, world meeting world–tragic,
heartfelt, and vibrant with life." -- Jonathan Lethem,
author of Fortress of Solitude