Characters in a strange and fantastical world

Gwendolyn Paradice describes herself as "hearing impaired, queer, and a member of the Cherokee Nation." She has an MA in nonfiction from the University of North Texas, an MFA from Bennington College, and a PhD from the University of Missouri. She teaches creative writing at Murray State University. More Enduring for Having Been Broken (2021), a collection of short stories, is her first book.

They are . . . original. I cannot do better than lift the book's description from the back cover; "A carnivorous ferris wheel, exploding chickens, a theme park that’s home to a god, and a centuries-old Spanish ship found in the Texas hill country. . . stories of children abandoned, forgotten, and ignored, their trauma and the desperate need to survive it. Whether it’s living in a rusted stingray above a tourist shop in coastal Florida, feeding faces to monstrous catfish in the bayou, maintaining a derelict and fog-shrouded hotel in South America, or escaping through the labyrinthine caves of Crete, the boys and girls in this collection weather their aloneness in a world touched by the strange and fantastical."

At the sentence and paragraph level, the writing is impressive. Where I had a problem with many of the stories were the "strange and fantastical" elements. The children in these stories—and the central characters all tend to be young—live in a world that is more cruel and meaningless than the world I recognize.

Why? 

Why invent an English (not Spanish) sloop-of-war from the 1700s, intact but abandoned, sitting  inexplicably in a Texas pond? Is this the best way to evoke, dramatize the 19-year-old's relationship with her grandfather? Rather than focus on the story Paradice is trying to tell, I focused on the extraordinary ship—where did it come from? What is its name (a record of it must exist somewhere)? Why aren't national news organizations and a maritime museum swarming around to check it out?

I had similar problems with the carnivorous carnival ferris wheel. It apparently lives on the bugs the character catches, but a ferris wheel is big. Would bugs be enough to sustain it? No wonder it began to eat a rider. Won't someone miss the half-eaten rider? Did the ferris wheel have parents? 

It occurs to me that when a story is set in a recognizable universe, the writer doesn't have to even think about such questions. Readers will assume a character—even an orphan—had parents. In some ways it makes the writing easier.

All this is to say that most of the stories in More Enduring for Having Been Broken provoke more questions than they answer, questions that left me unsatisfied. They told me nothing about the world or how it works. One exception to that is the story of Elias, an orphaned pre-teen boy, who finds refuge in the rusted interior of a stingray. What happens to Elias is extreme but believable and the story is accessible for it. Too many other characters function in a world I cannot accept or enjoy. Others may feel differently.