Thought Train to Pusan

Not really sure what to make of this one! It’s a slow build that’s a bit bizarre, cryptic, and mysterious. I wouldn’t say it was dull (there’s some juicy stuff in there and quite a bit of body horror) but the presentation is almost… blunted? The protagonists’ point of view is a hard one to crack into because of her personality, how she thinks, and how she speaks. Let’s get into it so I can explain. The official synopsis within the jacket of Follow Me to Ground reads:  “Ada and her father, touched by the power to heal illness, live on the edge of a village where they help sick locals—or “Cures”—by cracking open their damaged bodies or temporarily burying them in the reviving, dangerous Ground nearby. Ada, a being both more and less than human, is mostly uninterested in the Cures, until she meets a man named Samson. When they strike up an affair, to the displeasure of her father and Samson’s widowed, pregnant sister, Ada is torn between her old way of life and new possibilities with her

It’s been a minute since I’ve read a collection of short stories (or really, short stories in general), so I figured it might be worth a little revisit with Oyeyemi’s collection in What is Not Yours is Not Yours . Once again, I find my personal experience with short stories to be a bit of a mixed bag, not to mention how with any collection put together there are going to be those that are favored and those that are not. For the most part, these stories resonated on at least some level, and there was more positive than negative for me, though not completely. The nine stories in What is Not Yours is Not Your s are all connected through the motif of keys and locks, and the possibilities of what lies beyond a lock or what a key may open. A short blip to describe each is as follows (though they are pretty vague so as not to give anything away): “Books and Roses” - Two interconnected tales of loss and loneliness. A young orphan has a key around her neck, so similar to a key that was given to