Office of Historical Corrections

A Novella and Stories

No cover

Danielle Evans: Office of Historical Corrections (2021, Penguin Publishing Group)

English language

Published Feb. 10, 2021 by Penguin Publishing Group.

ISBN:
978-0-593-18945-0
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (7 reviews)

5 editions

Review of 'The Office of Historical Corrections' on 'Goodreads'

No rating






Short story collections are truly hit or miss for me. Either I absolutely adore them (How Long 'Til Black Future Month?, Ghost Summer) or I can't get into them at all. I grabbed this collection from the library based on a recommendation from a tweet.














https://twitter.com/leahrubenstein/status/1380867034058219526

As soon as I heard that the novella in this collection was about a government agency that made corrections to historical markers I was in. I want to have a job where I go around and fix incorrect apostrophes on signs. A girl can dream, right? Anyway, I downloaded this book and read it all in one day.I think part of the reason I don't always get into short stories is that they never feel finished to me. They always seem to leave off somewhere in the middle of a thought instead of having a good conclusion. The stories here did …

Review of 'The Office of Historical Corrections' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Ghosts are real.

When we think of them we tend to imagine them as ethereal, floaty wispy and irrelevant but no, oh no: they're ponderous, massive, and we all carry them with us, too often without even knowing they're there.

Evans sees them... but she's too much of an artist to show them to us. Instead, like astronomers inferring planets from their gravitational tug, she paints the wobble, the tug that these ghosts impose on their People. Sometimes the ghost is a seemingly minor decision we make on impulse, whose consequences we're left carrying; sometimes it's a remnant of our upbringing, an inheritance of our parents' ghosts; and there's also the crushing weight of centuries of racist oppression. Evans focuses on her subjects with exquisite precision: every sentence, every word matters. This is a book you savor, where you feel rewarded for taking your time. She has an uncanny eye …