Review: THE COLLECTORS: STORIES

Title: The Collectors: Stories edited by A.S. King

Book Beginnings quote: 

From "Play House" by Anna-Marie McLemore

The first thing most people knew about Miranda Asturias was that Miranda Asturias had a beautiful mother.

Friday56 quote:

From "Take It From Me" by David Levithan

It started with a spoon. I was six, maybe seven. Old enough to know right from wrong, but young enough that deciding between the two always felt situational, spontaneous.

Summary: Celebrated YA author, A.S. King collects weird stories and weird ideas. She thinks up weird questions. She writes them on sticky notes and posts them on the board above her desk. Among those sticky notes was the question, Why do we collect things? Near this sticky note was another written earlier in the year which read, Weird Short Story Collection. This story collection is the marriage of those two messages. "This anthology of stories is the result of me asking nine of my favorite YA writers to write a story about a collection and its collector, and asking them to to toss out conventions, as there were no rules, there was no "normal," and they could be as weird as they wanted" (Introduction).

Review: In my days as a teen librarian I came to really admire the writing of A.S. King. It seemed like every year she published another great book and usually the books told a very touching story in a surreal style. Three times her books have earned Printz Awards or honors (the highest book award for YA literature in the US.) The Collectors: Stories won the Printz Award in 2024, an unusual choice since short stories do not commonly win awards. But A.S. King assembled an all-star cast of writers and let them loose. Imaginations ran wild and the results were unique and, um, weird!

Some reviewers on Goodreads were very negative on the stories in The Collectors, saying all of them were too odd, chiding the authors for doing their assignment -- to tell a weird story about a weird collection/collector. When I saw these comments I wondered if any of these folks had ever read any of A.S. King's novels. I've read seven of her novels and all of them could be called weird/odd/surreal. After her novel Dig, won the Printz Award in 2019, I summed up the book this way "At its core Dig, a deep and confusing surreal novel, confronts the reality of a family who is deeply poisoned by racism. Poverty, hatred, family violence, and disenfranchisement are the results...King, in the author's notes, asks readers to confront racism in all its forms, many we never even think of as problems. The surreal text sets the issue on its edge, causing the reader to look at the problem in a new way." In the same review I took a look back at all her works. I recommend you take a look if you want to understand her writing style better. (A.S. King)

In The Collectors I liked some of the stories better than others but all of them got me thinking back to my life as a collector and about the collections my children had. In fact one evening when my adult daughter was visiting for a meal we all started sharing our favorite memories with our collections as we were growing up. My daughters had a collection of 'My Little Pony' toys. They had a hundred or more of those plastic ponies with their long hair manes. They loved them so much. One year their collection was accepted for display at the Hobby Hall at the State Fair. The girls carefully placed their ponies, their houses, and other MLP paraphernalia in the display case. When we went to the fair, the girls would beg to go stand by the case so they could listen to the comments other fair-goers would make about their collection. What a highlight in their young lives.  My husband collected coins. I collected dolls and stamps. We had a fun march down memory lane that dinner time as we recalled our collections. That is what I love the best about reading good books -- sharing with others what I felt and learned from the book.

And speaking of learned, I just read an interview with A.S. King in School Library Journal (July 19, 2024), "The Girls in the Cornfield. A.S. King Shares Why She Loves Libraries." In it she shares how a librarian and the library saved her from a torturous home life as a young child. She said,

Time doesn’t exist when you’re inside a book. Time doesn’t exist when you’re inside summer vacation. Time doesn’t exist when you’re inside trauma, either. In some weird way, these experiences overlapped—a slumber party pillow fort made of paper and words and ideas. I wonder if Ms. Mohn knew, armed with the superpowers of encouragement and librarianship, what she was doing for me—just one weird kid out of so many weird kids—building a suit of armor out of books. When school started again, she showed me the nonfiction section—exciting books about countries I wanted to visit, things I wanted to build, and history that made me care. She made me want to never stop learning.

I love libraries, too. Don't you? And I do recommend all books by A.S. King.

2024 Twenty Books of Summer Challenge

15 / 20 books. 75% done!

-Anne