Reviewed by Bridget Lillethorup

Amber Sparks's new short story collection, And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges, reads like a Bath and Body Works Melon Mania Glitter Stick from the early 2000s. On the surface, her words are beautiful, light, and sparkling. Once the glitter dries and sticks to your hair, though, her messages reveal crusty, dark, and poignant truths that simultaneously challenge and affirm definitions of womanhood and femininity. Sparks writes tales with familiar arcs, tones, and even characters: Athena challenges Zeus's power through video game antics, a Queen tries to protect her infant daughter, a friend group conspires on how to deal with their annoying theater friend. Sparks reclaims these female characters from their familiar, understated, and oppressive traditional narratives, making them wholly human. Images and turns of phrase stick pleasantly with the reader: "Someone once said—a poet?—that all light is starlight. Does that mean it's all dead on arrival, more echo than embrace?" Sparks’s stories read like this echo of light. We hear female voices from the past and the future resonating in our present moment. The entire collection is a commentary on the connectivity of the female experience.

The protagonists in And I Do Not Forgive You are nuanced, confused, grasping, and moving toward a deeper understanding of the female experience. Although this idea is, in many ways, an homage to the style of Angela Carter, Sparks tells these feminine stories in her own way, connecting them through a clash of timelines and generations in both plot and language. Characters are purposefully developed as both old and new definitions of womanhood. A poignant example of this is "Everyone's a Winner in Meadow Park," the story of a young girl living in a trailer park with a broken family. She deals with hypocritical adults and confusing friendships, like many young women. But she also has a ghost that follows her around who she describes as "boring as shit like some weird pioneer girl." The ghost appears to be a young and reserved settler from the time of western expansion, like a muffled Beth March. Mostly, the ghost just annoys the protagonist. Eventually, however, their worlds intertwine. At one point, the protagonist borrows the ghost's story of how her father died and claims it as her own ancestry because "It was easier than admitting I didn't have a story of my own." The protagonist begins to reflect on the connectivity of experience:

For me, I just like to see all the people and places and emotions and conflicts and struggles all exploding out of the pages of one single amazing book. Because that's how life really is, right? You don't get to just sit there and concentrate on one tiny little thing. Life just comes at you from everywhere and you have to deal with it all at once. Human life is a huge, messy, complicated, unbelievable thing. No wonder some people still don't get that we used to be apes just flinging our shit at each other.

The "pioneer girl" suffered, albeit a long time ago. The protagonist now understands a new layer of suffering, a suffering that reaches beyond her family and her trailer park. She sees the whole picture. She feels the unfairness and cruelty of the world. She learns from her feminine ancestors and moves toward a greater understanding of self. The knowledge is latent with sadness and defeat, like many of the endings in this collection.

Intersections of style provide comic relief between the heavy hitters. Sparks weaves texting lingo, hashtags, childlike perspectives, and pop culture references in each story, like Easter egg delights to find and savor. A beautiful style moment occurs in "A Short and Slightly Speculative History of Lavoisier's Wife." Antoine Laviosier was an eighteenth-century French chemist. And his wife? In this story, she is remembered as a feisty woman who surpassed the intelligence of her husband. In a fantastic clash of style, Sparks creates a hypothetical texting exchange between Lavoisier's wife and a friend where she is reacting to being called a helpmeet: 

Lavoisier's wife surely could have used a barf emoji had she ever looked up the origin of "helpmeet" and shared it with Charlotte Corday. 

Lavoisier's wife's text: Can you even fucking believe this shit (barf emoji here)

Lavoisier's wife's text back from bff Corday: OMG OF COURSE GENESIS, WTF

Lavoisier's wife considered herself a scholar, and owned her own large library with hundreds of books. We consider her a scholar, too. 

The passage is a delightful blend of past and present feminine emotion captured in written language. Sparks uses modern stylistic choices as a relational tool. Perhaps you don't have anything in common with Lavoisier's wife (even though she was "rather modern"), but these twenty-first-century phrases sprinkled in her writing cultivate a relational bridge between reader and character. 

As I read through the collection, I couldn't help but be charmed by the pink and purple book cover that framed the pages. Something about it touched into my own feminine past, one where ideas of love, lust, pain, and acknowledgement were molded mostly by Cosmopolitan magazines and after-school specials. It felt like I was reading my own diary from my adolescent years, the one that was bedazzled with rosy hues, haunted, and full of secrets. Except it's not only my story, it's the story of all women who have been mistreated and misremembered, of young girls today who are left on their own to understand themselves, and of people of all ages who struggle to define a love that they deserve. I have not drawn little hearts on a page since I was a diary-clenching young girl, but so many of Sparks's descriptions merit these little emojis. Moving through the collection, Sparks's words turn into mini-poems, calling readers to a single image or feeling, letting us pause. Like this last line from "Our Geographic History," which reads like a map of a failing relationship between a woman and her alcoholic partner:

Underneath the sky somewhere between Michigan and Indiana and you: Here is the moon, that same shape I've been looking at since I was small and thought I might do bigger things. Now I'm the deserted bride howling up against it. It's bigger and emptier than me. It's something to hold my sorrows, I suppose. It's something for you to remember me by.

At the end of each story, the message rings clear. There is a collective "us" (women and others oppressed because of their gender), who by the end of their stories, of our stories, are silently and recursively screaming "AND I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU." Although framed with pink and purple, Sparks's collection is brutally honest about feminine hardships. But there is consolation in numbers. As the narrator notes in "Everyone's a Winner in Meadow Park," "I don't want my life to be small and funny and sad." Sparks's collection reshapes memory, time, and language, positing women as complex creatures worthy of their own pages in history. Sparks makes us feel a little less "small and funny and sad," asserting "And I do not forgive you" as a battle cry for womankind.