Book review: Tell Me Yours, I'll Tell You Mine by Kristina Ten

 

Kristin Ten expertly entwines humor and dread in this collection of strange, unsettling stories. Paper dolls come to life and take revenge; a computer game teaches a strange, possibly demonic language; a water dragon is entrapped by a cheating card player, and a girls’ volleyball team is caught in a horrifying cult dynamic. Children’s games and folklore form the basis of many of these stories; this book is stepped in the 90s’ milieu. In Ten’s hands, nostalgia takes a sideways turn: the familiar and mundane are just slightly askew, or recast in a dramatically new light. A childhood camp legend comes to life in “Bunny Ears” and childhood games become the basis for officially approved methods of predicting love in “Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod.” Ten’s stories explore issues of identity and immigration. Most of all, they examine the experience of girlhood and womanhood in the 90s and beyond: the fierce adolescent need to belong, the anxieties, the threats to bodily autonomy and the violence that girls can enact on their own bodies. These sound like heavy issues, and they are; some stories, such as “Mel is for Melissa” are outright heartbreaking and wrenching. But there’s also a sly humor in many of these stories, braided with the horror, and a playful inventiveness. These are stories that breathe in the place between horror and realism, that slip between genres. Reading them, I was reminded of the work of Carmen Maria Machado, particularly in the surreal last story, “Another Round Again.” This story, one of my favorites, is a tale that begins in the seemingly mundane, set in an ordinary bar on an ordinary-seeming first date. But then the first oddities occur; there’s something off about the trivia night event in this bar. Reality begins to crack, and dread and uncertainty build and build. By the end, the main character—and reader—realizes that nothing of what she initially believed about herself may be true.

 

I said that Kristina Ten’s stories remind me of Carmen Maria Machado’s. They also remind me of that other master of the surreal, Kelly Link. And her stories are also unmistakably her own: fresh, odd, dark, disturbing, and darkly gorgeous. This is a wonderful debut collection, a surreal romp through 90s nostalgia and affecting look at girlhood and womanhood.