In “Ewwrrrkk”, an elderly woman shows her breasts to her eight-year-old great-granddaughter and gruffly explains why she doesn’t look like the naked bodies in magazines. In “Slingshot”, a seventy-year-old woman takes up with a thirty-two-year-old man but leaves him for not seeing her as a real partner. In many cases, it is the women who chooses to leave their partner or family behind-for better or for worse. All of Thammavongsa’s characters are resilient, but she gives a lot of room to her women to be boisterous, whip-smart, and sexually free. The women characters are especially strong. They crack jokes (sometimes very dirty ones), find joy in the smallest of places, and live as whole characters instead of two-dimensional sob stories. The strength and love within family is a common theme and there is often a humourous bent to Thammavongsa’s characters. Most stories end on a melancholic note, but it isn’t all doom and gloom. The book is a meditation on the feelings of displacement, discomfort, and alienation that often comes with the immigrant experience, particularly the refugee experience, in Canada. Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knifeis a masterful collection of short stories that bite.
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