This is Not Your City

By Connie Pan
Caitlin Horrocks astonishes with her debut collection, This is Not Your City. Her eleven heart wrenching stories display a master of fiction with diverse point of view and mesmerizing style. Even though her characters range from a child who inhabits the excruciatingly confusing world of playgrounds to a tired soul sleepwalking her 127th incarnation, the characters all long for connection while inhabiting an array of solitary worlds such as lost language, spinsterhood, and hate mail. Whether their station in life is an elementary school teacher who hates children and threatens students with conditionals scrawled on the chalkboard and then displayed in the classroom to a parent escaping the curveball trials of parenthood with a cruise hijacked by Somali pirates, all make shrewd emotional and intellectual growths. Horrocks illustrates ordinary worlds vibrantly with a mother who quietly curses her ten-year-old’s feet for getting all the grooves their brain lacks by charting their unlived life yearly with paint, poster board, and footprints. It shows her ability to skillfully uncolor, to make the fantastical mundane. Coincidentally, she revives her characters while displaying her keen writerly ability to both familiarize then estrange in just a few span of pages.