The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead

Finished August 11
The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead: Stories by Chanelle Benz

The stories in this collection are from the past and the present, from America and Europe, from male and female narrators. The range of Benz is quite wide and she displays it well here.
West of the Known is a story of the Wild West, of an outlaw brother come to free his young sister from a difficult life, but things don't always turn out how the characters expect, and this one has some interesting twists and turns.
Adela is a story within a story. It is written as an anonymous tale from the early 1800s, with plenty of footnotes to explain the story's origins. A tale of a woman whose settled life is unsettled by two young boys, eager for an adventure and romance. This is a story that raises questions. Why did she tell them her secrets? one wonders. A story filled with regrets.
Accidental is a story set in the modern day, a tale of a woman whose lives a difficult life. Her parents split up young and she lived mostly with her mother. Now, her mother is dying and she's trying to fulfil one of her last wishes. Her trip takes her back to the past in other ways, uniting her with not only her father, but other men from her past as well.
The Diplomat's Daughter is a tale of a woman who grew up as the daughter of an American diplomat, but who found herself living a different life after a military attack on a refugee camp she was volunteering at.
The Peculiar Narrative of the Remarkable Particulars in the Life of Orrinda Thomas is another story within a story. Presented as a memoir published in London in 1840 by an American slave woman, it tells the tale of a woman rescued from slavery to become a literary star and poet in her own right, who finds that her life is not what she thought.
James III has a twelve-year-old boy finding life difficult with his mother, step-father, and half-brother. As we meet him, he is on the run, beaten, bleeding and shoeless, when befriended by a young black man at the train platform. Overwhelmed by his situation, the boy looks to extended family and his new acquaintance to move forward with his life.
Snake Doctors is a story of a man who learns of his grandfather's death, not realizing that he'd been still alive. A letter of confession his grandfather left leaves more questions than it answers, sending him on a search for the truth.
The Mourners is another story more historical. As the story begins, a man is dying, and his wife is tending to him, trying to do the best she can by him. She is not the woman his family would have picked for him, and the marriage has brought children, but also had children taken from it. Some months after his death, the woman's father asks for her to come to him urgently, and she finds that her father is once again trying to use her to his own ends. A story with a surprising ending.
Recognition bring a young man historian to an archeological site of the end of a failed community. He has written much theory about this community, and now finds himself asked to comment on the findings there. But a woman who may or may not be someone he knows has her own agenda.
That We May Be All One Sheepefolde is a story from the sixteenth century narrated by a young monk, taken into the order as an orphan and finding a home there. As Henry VIII dismantles the monasteries and takes their lands and possessions for himself, the narrator finds his life uprooted and his loyalties torn.
These are all stories with interesting plots and characters, ones that surprise but also feel like one should have known they were coming. Very good writing.