This one has the one or other great individual story, but is overall not the place to start reading McHugh (go to the the brilliat China Mountain Zhang and return then, once you feel like you need to read everything by McHugh).

Very interesting and often frightening collection of scifi/fantasy stories exploring themes of mothers (and other family monsters) against various aspects of society + technology.

A beautiful collection, very calm; reminds me of what a friend said once about Leonard Cohen's voice, how it was plain and yet rang with infinite compassion. The clear and patient quality of the voice lets the worldbuilding and the impact of events really hit.

The following review appeared The New York Review of Science Fiction in October, 2006, reprinted from The Peterborough Examiner.Maureen McHugh's first collection Mothers And Other Monsters was a finalist for this year’s Story Prize, inaugurated in 2004 to acknowledge and support the writing of quality short fiction in this age of the novel. Interestingly, all four of McHugh’s own novels, including her debut, the award winning China Mountain Zhang, are science fiction. Her high literary concerns

I skipped one of the stories, but all in all, I LOVED this collection. The perfect mix of bizarre, fantastic and strange circumstances and just generally good writing.If I'd written this book, I could die a happy woman.

Finally got to read a collection from a writer whom everyone is raving about. Previously I had not been impressed because her choice of topics is so varied. So a story can be a hit or miss unless the reader has been "primed" beforehand. For example, I almost gave up midway on her more popular "the Cost to be Wise" (I love far futures and off world-ers, but huh? the world building is weak imho)ButI'm glad I persisted because McHugh can touch one's right hemisphere through stories like "Presence"

Maureen McHugh is going to be a guest speaker at WisCON (the feminist sci-fi conference) that I am hoping to go to in Madison in May. I loved her earlier book China Mountain Zhang, so i was excited about this one. The short stories were not all sci-fi, which I was surprised about but not at all disappointed. And they were so interesting: about alzheimers, life after death, cloned children, and one about a lost colony from earth. Really compelling and well written, though I wanted most of them to...

A beautiful collection of speculative and literary short stories based around the difficulties of motherhood -whether biological or step-parenting. Many of the stories contain aching sadness, especially around the theme of losing oneself or a loved one, for instance to Alzheimers. Stories are set in other worlds, alternative pasts and the near-future. Add technology to slice of life tales and you have the writings of Maureen McHugh.

Lovely short story collection of spec fic, mostly examining our relationships with family through technology.

Captivating!I was first introduced to Maureen McHugh’s work through After the Apocalypse: Stories (2011). I just so happened to spot a review of it online – just where that was escapes me now, sadly (reading recommendations, got any?) – and, in search of new post-apocalyptic fiction (bonus points for zombies!), I snapped it up immediately. After devouring it in all of a week, I quickly tore through her novels: Nekropolis (2002), China Mountain Zhang (1997), Half the Day is Night (1996), and

Interesting collection.

I was reminded of Chekhov (the Russian author, not Enterprises' navigator) when reading this collection for several reasons:(1) I'm in the midst of plowing through all 13 volumes of Constance Garnett's translations of Chekhov, so he's on my mind and the temptation to compare and contrast is strong.(2) Like Chekhov, McHugh's stories (in this collection) tend to lack plots. There's not much "action," and rarely is there resolution. For example, in "The Cost to Be Wise" the villagers of a rediscove...

Difficult topics: rape, murder, torture, death,human trafficking, family relationships, Alzheimer's, and Dementia Excellent writing with plenty of thought provocationMost of the profanity occurs within just one of the stories.

Mothers & Other Monsters is domesticity redone through a science-fiction lens. McHugh runs to recurrent themes like a sore tooth: troubled adolescents on the cusp of adulthood, middle-aged women forced to care for someone ravaged by Alzheimer's. Fear, and love, and the ideals that people always fail to live up. She has some talent as a writer, except that she really struggles with endings. Her stories don't end, so much as close with a quick-jab to the solar plexus, a gasp of realization that it...

At first, I thought I generally found these stories just mediocre. They were interesting and even beautiful, but they seemed to meander, and the endings didn’t really “land” for me—they just ended. But then I got to “Presence,” which fractured my heart into a million pieces from the first page to the last. It truly gets at how it feels to care for someone who suffers from a condition that affects their memory and/or powers of reasoning (in this case, Alzheimer’s). It’s wonderful and terrible. Th...

wish there was more from this author

I find favourite authors and favourite books so much more difficult to review than books I didn't like. As it happens, Maureen F. McHugh is one my favourite authors and this is a wonderful book of 12 short stories. I liked every single one of them, but there were some stand outs. Ancestor Money (2003) - Dead Rachel receives a letter while she's in the afterlife, telling her she's to receive ancestor money. To collect it, she needs to travel to the Chinese afterlife. (Honorable Ancestress of Amel...

I gave this a 4-star rating because I think Ms. McHugh is a great writer. I am not a big fan of uncomfortable stories with vague endings, but I was definitely riveted.

I now there are stories with a hidden subject, like "Arrival", in which the fact that understanding how the alien language works allow humans to break the barriers of time, and one could expect that stories with no eminent subject actually have a hidden one.But I feel that doesn't happen here.There are just... stories. And, sad to say, they are not even good.There are points that never lead to anywhere, and doesn't seem related to the main history; most of them end with no conclusion at all (wil...

3.5 stars rounded up. These are earlier stories from Maureen F. McHugh. Her characters and the settings matter much more than the story, and she struggles with endings. In this, McHugh reminds me of Zadie Smith.McHugh often takes present day settings and adds a small technological change that gently marks her stories as sci-fi; otherwise, they would pass as slice-of-life short stories. The precipitating technology could be a tracking app that parents use on their teenagers, a cure for Alzheimer'...