by Kirti Bhadresa
ECW PRESS
2024/$24.95/296 pp.
In her debut short story collection, Kirti Bhadresa orients a wide range of stories around characters of South Asian descent, mostly women. These stories deftly subvert immigrant cliches in their presentation of familial dynamics, food and cultural expectations, while not shying away from the sharp-edged realities of daily microaggressions, interracial (white-partnered) relationships, discrepancies in class and labour, and first-generation hustle. Cinematic in scope but intimate in each depiction, An Astonishment of Stars features among its protagonists a couple who moves from India to open a restaurant on the prairies and a mother who uses her white husband’s name to book a dinner reservation. With attentive care, Bhadresa traces the ordinariness of lives often made invisible.
In the more memorable stories, innocuous details evoke a story’s mood. “The Fundraiser” portrays the “pallid sausages” bought by a mother for a school fundraiser, despite the family not consuming meat. The title story, “An Astonishment of Stars,” constructs a family’s world around an abandoned airplane that creaks in the wind. Such vivid distillations serve as a core around which a story can pivot and stretch. At times I was reminded of Flannery O’Connor or Souvankham Thammavongsa—authors whose stories are taut with a thrumming tension. But too often in this collection, however, the narration feels detached, as if observing characters from a distance. When this narrative style is deployed in long stories, more suited to novella length and in which decades elapse, even lifetimes (“Backstage Passes,” “Lighten Up”), intriguing characters feel less dynamic than they could be and blend into fast-moving montages.
The strongest stories feel the closest to the characters they portray, landing in a specific scene and unspooling in crystalline moments made liminal and material. “Summer Camp” upends a coming-of-age experience, granting a long-suffering teenager sudden, dazzling agency. “Braids” tugs at the complexities of a kid on vacation with her father where she finds, to her burgeoning racial awareness, that she resembles the locals more than other tourists. The collection is at its best in a story such as “Invasion,” where a supple grace defines the writing and transports the reader into the life of a pregnant mother who is following her own mother’s recipe from deep intuition. Knitting together bodily awareness and glimpses of familial history, Bhadresa’s understated craft and keen gaze land here with confidence, and her ode to brown and South Asian women comes alive. Mothers and daughters, aunties, parents, neighbours and other forms of relation encounter one another and shine in the beauty of seeing and being seen.
Céline Chuang is a writer and bookseller in Edmonton
_______________________________________
