Review: 'Shit Cassandra Saw: Stories' by Gwen E. Kirby

I love short stories. I really love short stories full of angry and conflicted women. I also love vibrant covers that mean you can't look away. The moment I saw it in the bookstore it was done for all the other books there, nothing was going to make me pick them over Kirby's book. And I'm glad to say the cover lives up to what lies behind it. 

Pub. Date: 1/11/2022
Publisher: Penguin Press

Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn't mean she's resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren't ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers. Gwen E. Kirby experiments with found structures--a Yelp review, a WikiHow article--which her fierce, irreverent narrators push against, showing how creativity within an enclosed space undermines and deconstructs the constraints themselves. When these women tell the stories of their triumphs as well as their pain, they emerge as funny, angry, loud, horny, lonely, strong protagonists who refuse be secondary characters a moment longer. From "The Best and Only Whore of Cym Hyfryd, 1886" to the "Midwestern Girl [who] is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories," Kirby is playing and laughing with the women who have come before her and they are telling her, we have always been this way. You just had to know where to look.

Shit Cassandra Saw is one of the best recent examples, to me, of how the most absurd stories, the weirdest angles, the roughest moments, are also the stories, angles, and moments that go the deepest, that reveal the most truth. In Kirby's collection we see women yearn for safety, for self, for community. We also see them lash out, start fires, wield knives. We see love and hate, in all their complexity. And although each story had me laugh out loud at times, they also had me fall quiet. By imagining what it would be like to be radioactive or a cockroach-mutant and walk across the street safely, it came home to me how desperately I crave that feeling of safety for myself and other women. It is hard to wrap all of this into stories and it is by breaking with tradition, by being willing to go to the dark places and find some joy and mischief there, that Kirby nonetheless achieves it.

Shit Cassandra Saw is full of brilliant stories that defy form and tradition. Each of these stories is truly its own beast, different in scope and range, but always full of ambition. I could heap praise on all of them. 'A Few Normal Things That Happen A Lot' is a story about women feeling safe, even if it requires some ... adjustments. This is probably the story that has stayed with me the most, just purely because of how grounded it is in the female experience while playing with the unexpected. Another story that has been on my mind a lot is 'Here He Preached His Last', a story about adultery and ghosts and desire and shame. It's a confronting story that I imagine might turn some readers off, but I found it utterly refreshing. 'Marcy Breaks Up with Herself' is truly tragic and yet the ending was utterly beautiful. I'm not sure how Kirby struck that balance, but it was masterful. 'Casper' is a feverdream of a story, full of teenage girl ambitions, hopes, and dreams, as well as a stuffed albino wallabee. Another standout for me was 'First Woman Hanged for Witchcraft in Wales, 1594' which plays with story-telling and motherhood and reignited my desire to be a witch. A fascinating solitary story is 'Jerry's Crab Shack: One Star', a Yelp review by the collection's sole male narrator. It is a fascinating story about the pressures of masculinity and marriage.

Gwen E. Kirby moved herself onto my 'Will Buy on Sight'-list by the time I was halfway through the third story of Shit Cassandra Saw. The rage and joy in her voice is like an electric jolt. Kirby revels in everything womanhood has to offer, from the beautiful to the horrifying... maybe especially the horrifying, and she depicts it all without a trace of shame. The women in Shit Cassandra Saw are complex human beings, torn many different ways, and I developed a soft spot for all of them. They felt like me, like my friends. (If that's a compliment for anyone involved I can't entirely say.) I wanted to take some time with this collection, really savour each story, and instead I raced through it, each story a new high. I do know that my re-read, which will be soon, will be of the slow kind, in which each word will hit anew. That is the beauty of a good, even great, short story collection like Shit Cassandra Saw: there is something new to be found in these stories every time you read them. I'm going to be savouring Kirby's stories for a long time to come and I can't wait to see what she comes out with next.

I give this collection...

5 Universes!

I absolutely adored Shit Cassandra Saw, its irreverence, its clarity, its wit, and all its violence. Kirby is a force to be reckoned with and I shall be yelling about this collection for a long time.