Flash Fiction rules! And for this week Hannah Storm is the Queen! Thank you Reflex Press for sending me a copy of The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing. Released this week it is my absolute pleasure to be able review.
I have made no secret of my deepening love affair with flash fiction and the fact that I can’t cram enough of it through my eyes and into my brain. Good flash fiction is compulsive stuff, tiny morsels of yummy delights that linger on your palate for days, sometimes weeks at a time. The kind of experience that makes your brain zing and then yearn for more. And that kind of flash is exactly what Hannah Storm is serving up here.
What always truly amazes me is the depth that you find in excellent short fiction and running throughout Hannah’s work is a tangible sense of humanity, humility and understanding. This is the human condition laid bare. These stories touch upon all corners of life, they take you to the highest heights and the lowest lows, sometimes just within the space of a few lines. But always they feel so real.
There are many themes that bind these stories together but the thread that seems to bind them all is the lived female experience. The empowerment and definition of women’s lived experiences and a clear acknowledgement of the challenges, abuse and extremes they face. At times these stories feel like spells or incantations. Places where women can see each other, hold out their hands and say ‘I feel that too’.
The arc of experiences and perspectives within this collection are vast. Each reader will naturally gravitate towards individual pieces, each reader will be drawn to stories that chime with them. For myself, wrestling through the first week of the holidays and with reluctant, dare we say difficult teenagers, pieces like ‘Octopus’ and ‘Birth Plan’ hit me with a thump. It is also proving impossible to get beautiful, lost Amy from ‘Birthday Girl’ to stop dancing in the corners of my brain.
This book is masterclass in flash. It’s a master class in knowing how to grab you by the heart and give it a beat stopping squeeze. Congratulations Hannah, you have a triumph on your hands.
Rachel x
Book Bound 