The Office of Historical Corrections

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 that too but I was drawn in by her use of language and her ideas. I'm not usually a person to like lyricism over plot but this is an exception. Happily Ever AfterI think this first story is one of the weakest. It is about a person who works at a Titanic replica in the gift shop who gets cast in a music video. Richard of York Gave Battle in VainThis is a story of a wedding weekend that goes very wrong and the people who get caught up in it.

"In her line of work, it was sometimes helpful not to be immediately identified as an American, to be, in name and appearance, ethnically ambiguous, although her actual background—Black and Polish and Lebanese—was alchemy it had taken the country of her birth to make happen."

Boys Go To JupiterThis is an interesting story of a white woman who gets called out online for wearing a Confederate bikini and then things get worse when she defends herself. Is she right or wrong is left open to interpretation. AlcatrazWhat happens after the thing that you have focused your life around is over? What comes next? It also dives into what makes a family.Why Won't Women Just Say What They Want?This was one of my favorites. A famous male artist decides to apologize the all the women he's harmed in his life - and there have been a lot. But what is the true point of his apologies? I loved all the women in this. Their reactions were so true to life.

"The Model/Actress knew: the volcano was dangerous because he’d never actually expected to be in it. He had always counted on being good enough in the end. He had counted on absolution. He had counted on love. “Thank you,” he was going to say when everyone was appeased, while he stood on the platform and dramatically revealed the volcano’s violent core. “Your generosity tonight has saved my life again.” He thought the Forgiveness was his to declare. It was right there in the title."

Anything Could DisappearA young woman is left with a toddler on a cross country bus ride and she decides to keep him. The Office of Historical CorrectionsThis is the novella about the government agency. A woman is called on to travel to Wisconsin to try to rein in a rogue ex-coworker.

"She corrected every memorial to lynching, every note about burnt schoolhouses and destroyed business districts, murdered leaders and bombed churches, that failed to say exactly who had done it. She thought the insistence on victims without wrongdoers was at the base of the whole American problem, the lie that supported all the others."

"The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they’re wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum. There’s always a white person out there who wants to overpronounce a foreign word, or try an exotic food, or shop for crafts, but no one wants to do that for Black folks."

"...you know how white people love their history right up until it’s true."

Each story was thought provoking. Even if the story itself didn't entirely work for me there was a small insight in each one that struck me. This review was originally posted on Based On A True Story

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 for detail and expression: I felt entirely transported into each narrative; a part of it. I felt the shame of judging others without being able to see their inner turmoils, less so their ghosts. Felt the conflicting influences of multiple planets, those with privilege and those lacking, orbiting and affecting each other without ever meeting. I felt the ghosts without ever seeing them, drawn in negative - dare I say white - space.

Wish I could give this six stars.