The Office Of Historical Corrections {Book Review}
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The Office Of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans was spectacular! I’ve always enjoyed novels, big novels, I especially enjoy series; when I like something, I want more of it. I have mourned after finishing a series that hit just right. I’ve never paid much attention to short fiction, but this collection of 6 short stories and one Novella completely shifted my perspective on short fiction. Danielle Evans is an expert at creating tension. Her characters are interesting, flawed, complicated women trying to navigate the complexities of American life; sometimes confronting their history, and other times running from it. I felt sucked in by each story and it was impossible for me to put the book down; I finished it in 3 brief sessions. All the stories in this volume focus on themes of race and history. The stories illustrate how our personal family histories fit into the larger tapestry of U.S. History. Reading this collection during Black History Month made it more powerful because all month I have been reading, Stamped From The Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi, which exposes the history of racist ideas in America. Much of the character’s personal and family histories in Evans stories echo the struggles, injustice and discrimination I have been reading about in Kendi’s tome.
In this collection we meet 7 female protagonists and get into their minds during a brief intense point in their life. All the stories reveal different facets of women’s experiences in life. In one story we watch a young woman working a dead end retail job in a tourist trap, grapple with her mother’s death from cancer and the looming decision about removing her own ovaries as a preemptive strike against a similar fate. In another piece, we follow a photo journalist to a friend’s over-planned Midwestern wedding weekend. In another story we see a college student grapple with the fallout of a viral picture of her wearing a confederate flag bikini. We see two cousins, one Black and one White, reunite for a visit to Alcatraz, a place that has a significant history for their grandfather. In another story we watch the elaborate art instillation apologies of an artist to the multiple women he dated and destroyed. In the last short we see the story of a young woman who becomes, unintentionally, in possession of an abandoned child. These stories are gripping and dripping with the emotional marrow at the core of the female experience.
The novella The Office Of Historical Corrections is brilliant and steals the show. The premise is that our protagonist, Cassie, is a historian who left her tenure-track job as a professor at GW University in DC to work in a government agency where she makes corrections to the historical accuracy of literally ANYTHING. She could correct the tour guide at a monument in DC one day, an advertisement for a Juneteenth cake at a bakery another day, and fly to Minnesota to deal with a White Suprematist’s vitriol over a correction her over-zealous coworker made to a historical monument, the next week. The idea is bizarre, and feels like the plot of an episode of The Twilight Zone; but in today’s climate of “Fake News” and “Alternative Facts” this story is timely and poignant. Danielle Evans’ writing is superb and the way her brain works is fascinating to me. I loved this collection of short fiction. I recommend it to everyone, and I can’t wait to read her other collection.
The Office Of Historical Corrections by Danielle Evans⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
