Sara Rauch’s debut, What Shines From It, is a luminously rich, heart-wrenching collection of eleven stories. Stories written in both the shadow and the spotlight of the feminine experience, examining the pain and beauty of life simultaneously alongside one another. The stories in this collection share themes of love and loss, relationships and frayed bonds, desire and broken spirits — universal trials which haunt each of us throughout our lives. Powerfully human and familiar, yet transcendent in their emotion, these stories fuse the light and dark of lived experience, providing an authentic slice of life in a way readers won’t soon forget.
Here are a few stand-outs you won’t want to miss …
- “Slice”: A young actress commissions a one-of-a-kind gown from budding young designer, Emmeline. The inspiration for what the dress should look like? A Japanese eggplant. As Emmeline spends her evenings piecing this unique garment together by hand, a personal relationship begins to unexpectedly unravel.
- “Abandon”: When Calla regains consciousness in the hospital, her lifelong friend Audrey is at her side but her fiance is nowhere to be found. She learns he walked away, unlikely to return, following the car accident which stole her unborn child from her womb, leaving her severely injured both physically and emotionally. This is a story of inexplicable loss, a life forever altered, and a woman’s struggle to find a way forward, if one even exists.
- “Kintsukuroi”: A married woman’s work piecing together broken pieces of pottery with golden lacquer (the ancient art of kintsukuroi) illuminates the both highs and lows of her secret affair with a married man. Is this tryst worth the possible consequences, though?
- “Frequency”: A married couple attempts to forge forward following multiple miscarriages in this painfully accurate depiction of grief. While Derek yearns to try again, Sadie buries herself in an all-consuming fascination with the bats living in their attic. And a barista at her favourite local coffeehouse.
Rauch’s writing style is spare and to-the-point, making every word count. Yet the underlying emotion is not lost; in fact it is rather enriched by this approach. In mere pages she is able to fully lure the reader into the world of each story, as much by what she leaves off the page as that which she pours onto it. Readers will quickly tear through this collection, but will find themselves ruminating on it long after turning the final page.
What Shines From It is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore. Many thanks to Alternating Current Press and Lori Hettler of TNBBC Publicity for providing me with an advance copy. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
The eleven stories in Sara Rauch’s What Shines from It are rife with the physical and psychic wounds of everyday life. In “Beholden,” girl meets boy meets the unsettled spirits of post-9/11 New York City, but her future can’t hold them all. In “Kitten,” a struggling veteran and his wife argue over adopting an abandoned kitten, deepening their financial and emotional rifts. In “Abandon,” a ghost-baby ravages a woman’s body following a late-term miscarriage, marring her chances for new love. And in “Kintsukuroi,” a married potter falls in love with a married geologist and discovers the luminosity of being broken.
What Shines from It is populated by women on the verge of transcendence—brimming with anger and love—and working-class artists haunted by the ghosts of their desires. Abiding by a distinctly guarded New England sensibility, these stories inhabit the borderlands of long-established cities, where humans are still learning to embrace the natural world. Subtly exploring sexualities, relationships, birth and rebirth, identity, ghosts, and longing, Rauch searches for the places where our protective shells are cracked and, in spare, poetic language, limns those edges of loneliness and loss with light.
