REVIEW

Swetha Amit’s Cotton Candy from the Sky & Other Stories is a rich, earnestly-wrought collection of nine stories about wanting to escape modern life and reconnect with nature in favor of a simpler life.

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Amit’s characters want so many things: for their parents to stop yelling, for their knee injury to heal, for their marriages to improve, for the doldrums of middle-aged life to disappear. Each looks to the natural world to cure what ails them. In the titular story, a child narrator makes a fabulist exit out of an airplane to retrieve candy from the clouds. In “Beneath the Waves,” a mother takes refuge in a world beneath the sea on a scuba trip. Amit’s characters are so open and expressive about their desires that the reader can’t help but feel the pull of their want. This effect culminates in the story, “Swimming with Dolphins,” where Amit gorgeously captures a moment of pure, transcendent joy when a middle-aged man jumps with abandon into open water to swim among a pod of wild dolphins, his lifelong spirit animal.

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Life, sadly, cannot be all swimming with dolphins, though. The last story, “Sprouting Wings,” brilliantly turns the collection on its head, taking all this longing for nature and a more natural life to its logical end, questioning whether we really want what we say we do. Because, sure, we all want to escape, but what are the boundaries of that? Animals in the wild live precariously. They don’t know where their next meal will come from, or when. Their homes lie open to the elements, as do their children. That much uncertainty and risk can’t seriously be what everyone wants. So, what are we really daydreaming about? What, precisely, are we longing for? The reader can sense Amit at our side, sitting with us, as we realize—wait—if we don’t want our dreams either, what do we want? Perhaps we don’t always have to know. Perhaps momentary escape is enough. Dreams, like stories, Amit reminds us, don’t have to come true to do their job.

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Book Details

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Cotton Candy from the Sky can be purchased here. 

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Published by Bottlecap Press. The volume is 5.5”x 8” and comprises 37 pages of prose. The cover and pages are pleasingly smooth. The binding is a classic double staple.

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