Review: What It Might Feel Like to Hope

27 de abril de 2025

Dorene O’Brien
156 pages
Baobab Press (2019)

Read this if you like: Karen Russell, Carmen Maria Machado, quirky short fiction
tl;dr summary: Collection of (mostly) literary stories in which characters hope, for better or worse (mostly worse).

See the book on Bookshop

I’ve been in a mood lately where I’m particularly susceptible to buying books whose covers I find delightful, which I’ll admit was the main reason I picked up this collection. The image of the iguana clinging to a heart touched the lizard-loving part of me from the moment I saw this book on the Baobab Press table. And, I will say, I have started to distrust the adage of “don’t judge a book by its cover” because, so far, every book I’ve bought for cover reasons has turned out to be a banger, and What It Might Feel Like to Hope is no exception.

While the cover got me to buy this collection, the confidence of the voice in the first story (“eight blind dates later”) is what drew me into it. The narrator strikes the perfect balance for literary fiction between being undeniably weird and painfully normal. It gives the feeling of someone telling a true story from their own life, but one infinitely more interesting than the typical anecdote a friend might relay. I was particularly impressed because, in its essence, “eight blind dates later” is exactly the type of literary fiction I usually actively dislike—a first-person post-mortem of a failed relationship. That normally prompts me to a big old yawn, but in this case the voice drew me through until it got to a part I found legitimately interesting from a plot perspective: the moment the narrator pretends to be a random fan of his ex-girlfriend Shelby’s romance novels so that he can get insights into how he messed up their relationship. That’s a sitcom setup, really, but also achingly relatable—who hasn’t wanted to get that kind of input to quell a lingering regret?

The stories in this collection are full of those little moments, too—places where characters do things that are just weird enough to be interesting while still staying completely believable at their core. In the second story it’s the sad situation of Ed in “falling forward”, an aging, friendless drunk whose neighbor Faith becomes his go-to bail-out buddy; in the third, “turn of the wind”, a similarly aged crystal expert pivots to making weathervanes after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. In each story, we watch characters take steps that feel logical, even inevitable, at the same time that they pull the reader in directions that would have been impossible to anticipate from the first page.

The quiet surprises scattered throughout What It Might Feel Like to Hope are the first craft lesson I’d say readers can learn from this collection. It’s a testament to what literary fiction can be, in the right hands—that a quiet story about people living quiet lives can still be interesting and fresh. Going along with this, the way these moments and characters are written is worth a study for literary short fiction writers. Every place, person, and moment shown in these pages feels absolutely real. There is an authenticity to the dialogue, a crispness and vividness to the descriptions, that is as effortless on the page as it is masterful.

Not every story in this collection is completely straightforward, either, which I appreciated. The most unique formally—and also one of my favorite stories in the collection—is “tom hanks wants a story: the anatomy of a tale”, which is simultaneously a zombie story and a meta-story about writing a zombie story, two threads that weave together beautiful into one highly entertaining little romp.

I would also strongly recommend this collection to anyone who is interested in playing with time more in their short fiction, because O’Brien has an impeccable eye for navigating nonlinear time in a way that feels completely smooth and integral to the story being told. The best example of this for me was “reaping”, whose short, 1-paragraph scenes jump back and forth between narrator Kate’s childhood and her present. Over the course of the story, these small segments paint a picture of her and her brother, Nicky, as two damaged adults, revealing only at the end the full extent of the tragedy that made them that way, described with a simplicity that makes it only more heartbreaking. I similarly appreciated the time play in “honesty above all else”, which is in essence a frame story but with the added twist of a narrator who is telling a “true story” that had been kept a secret until the main character in the framed story, Mrs. O’Leary, recently died.

The characters in most of the stories in What It Might Feel Like to Hope aren’t good people—but they’re also not necessarily bad people. Most of them are just people, in all their complex strangeness, doing the only things they know how, acting in the only ways they ever have. These stories feel like true snapshots into real lives, and that’s maybe the best praise I can think to give a literary fiction short story: they feel, at times, realer than real life, and are absolutely a joy to read.