Will I love If I Were the Ocean, I'd Carry You Home?

Pete Hsu’s twelve stories are largely set where I live in Southern California. The title story in the collection starts on the freeway, where Southern Californians like me spend much of our time.

Each story is disarmingly disquieting, perfectly capturing trauma, terror, and tragedy from the point of view of children and young people. I found Hsu’s sentences deceivingly simple as well, which adds to the heartbreak of characters who have no agency in this out-of-control world.

There’s hope in Hsu’s pages as well. In the story ‘A Penny Short’ the narrator wonders if we’re “are all secretly good people … show more.