Of Starfish Tides and Other Tales

The stories of Willis’s debut collection (after the novella The Scarab Children of Montague) have the elegance of a shelf of Fabergé eggs: exquisitely and uniquely wrought, yet fundamentally the same. A narrow palette of themes and images shape these 17 tales, chief among them broken (or lost, stolen, and traded) hearts and memory made tangible through music, ghosts, bones, and other objects. Strictly speaking, each story stands alone, but there’s a strong sense of interconnectivity between them. It’s immediately clear, for example, that readers should perceive the connection between “the leafy sea dragon... in its kelp forest” in the title story, and “seahorses hiding in a kelp forest” in “A Silver Thread Between Worlds.” Several of these narratives end abruptly: in “Sundark and Winterling,” a widow sets out for revenge—but does she get there? Her own story does not say. But the symmetry between her and Willis’s other heart-wounded protagonists seeking closure to the tune of similar music under similar skies yields the answer by analogy. Willis’s central ideas do not just benefit from devouring the collection as a whole; they demand it. (June)