Daydreams of Angels
Stories
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Inventive, outlandish, and tender fairy tales from a bestselling author
The fantastic has always been at the edges of Heather O'Neill's work. In her bestselling novels Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, she transformed the shabbiest streets of Montreal with her beautiful, freewheeling metaphors. She described the smallest of things—a stray cat or a second-hand coat—with an intensity that made them otherworldly.
In Daydreams of Angels, O'Neill's first collection of short stories, she gives free reign to her imaginative gifts. In "The Ugly Ducklings," generations of Nureyev clones live out their lives in a grand Soviet experiment. In "Dear Piglet," a teenaged cult follower writes a letter to explain the motivation behind her crime. And in another tale, a grandmother reveals where babies come from: the beach, where young mothers-to-be hunt for infants in the surf. Each of these beguiling stories twists the beloved narratives of childhood—fairy tales, storybooks, Bible stories—to uncover the deepest truths of family life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this collection of strange and whimsical stories, O'Neill (The Girl Who Was Saturday Night) explores love and family in present-day Canada through quirky yarns filled with talking animals, modern versions of biblical characters, and countless other curiosities. Many are framed as stories told to children by their grandparents and, as such, are filled with the magical feel of fairy tales, where all things are possible. In the title story, a cherub is sent to Montreal during World War II and falls in love with Yvette, a beautiful and vivacious girl whose father has just been shipped off to fight in Normandy. A grandfather tells his grandchildren about his romantic adventures dating a half-swan, a half-deer, and a monkey-girl while working on Moreau's island in "The Isles of Dr. Moreau." In "Bartok for Children," a Canadian solider is rescued from death during WWII by a French toy maker. The toy maker makes him a new clockwork heart and loves him as if he were his own son, but the toy parts in his body create some unexpected problems. "The Dreamlife of Toasters" centers on an exceptional android in the year 2112, who has an accident that leaves her with the human ability to understand humor. These stories are told with liveliness and wonder, but they often lack depth and complexity. O'Neill is at her best in the longer stories and the ones more grounded in reality, where she has a chance to develop her characters and explore their darkness.
