Harare Review of Books

212 pp. Published May 6, 2025 by Feminist Press at CUNY. Fiction anthology.

---

“Wild” and “girls” are two words that are not supposed to go together, or so we’re taught. Because stories about wild women and girls are somehow subversive. There are ridiculous expectations placed on women and girls in certain societies, so that these are the words we expect rather: Submissive. Passive. Receptive. Agreeable. Heterosexual. Pretty. Shiny… happy… sunny. Of course, though, the reality is that girls and women are not always these things, and the girls and women in these stories certainly aren’t.

In Sympathy for Wild Girls one girl transforms into a being that grunts, bites, and has matted hair (my hero! but then I feel her pain acutely). Another wants to lose all excess weight “until my old clothes only functioned as parachutes, boat sails, curtains to gather wind, tents that could shelter anything but my body.” Yet another is transforming right before people’s eyes—but those people don’t acknowledge it, looking around and through her. Ava’s story is the most memorable for me: after a great trauma, she starts floating, and has to use weights to hold her down to the surface of the earth.

These are, of course, stories about pain. About the pressures placed on women to conform: Be pretty, and hairless in all of the right places. They’re about how dangerous the world is for girls, when they just want to be allowed to be, and to breathe. They’re about the women who raise girls with all of their own pain leaking from every pore. In these stories, bodies are weird and sometimes horrifying; girls have magical abilities; and sometimes the world around them shifts in inexplicable ways. They’re angry stories, and sometimes hopeless: not every character finds redemption, just like in real life. And it’s striking that although not always explicit, the young women and girls in this collection are women of colour.

I love anti-fairytles, and when they’re this subversive and about women of colour, I’m even more thrilled that they’re out in the world. This, too, is Black punk.

Thanks to Feminist Press and Edelweiss for early DRC access.

Affiliate link: Support independent bookshops and my writing by ordering it from Bookshop here.