Review: The Girl Who Cried Diamonds by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

Have you ever finished a book that amazed you so much that as soon as you closed it after reading the final page you wanted to immediately start over from the very beginning? Maybe it was because the ending rocked you, threw you for a loop, and you wanted to start over to see if you could, on a second reading, see the twist coming. Or perhaps the writing was so glorious, the characters and the  world-building so vivid that you didn’t want to leave them/it? Now imagine a book of short stories—fourteen in all— where each story, each individual one, demands an instant reread because of literally all the things mentioned above. Imagine the writing, so beautiful and haunting, the plots so twisted and unsettling, the characters so thoughtfully constructed, so tightly wound, that only a second (and third in some instances!) reread would do?  This was exactly my experience reading The Girl Who Cried Diamonds by Rebecca Hirsch Garcia. ECW Press kindly sent me an ARC to review and I was riveted from the very first page. Each of these fourteen stories packs a certain kind of punch, and although it’s never the same punch twice, there are definitely some themes that run through the stories, threading them together, creating a mesmerizing, perfect collection.

Hirsch Garcia masterfully takes aspects from myth, folklore, and fairy tales to create incredibly realistic characters who she then throws into incredibly unreal, extraordinary, and often dangerous situations. In the titular story, for example, a girl’s body emits precious metals and jewels in its fluids. In Common Animals, in the middle of an argument, a woman’s partner suddenly turns into a wolf. In the final story in the collection, Woman Into Cloud, a middle-aged wife and mother escapes the confines of a body and becomes, well, a cloud. And while these very brief plot summaries suggest whimsy, much like the fairy tales they evoke, there is a deep, deep darkness to them. Indeed, they feel like the kinds of stories that are passed down as warnings; tall tales to keep us from straying too far afield, to warn us of certain things, certain evils that cannot be named—or things there are no names for. 

Hirsch Garcia explores several themes throughout the collection and the one that really stood out for me, the one I just couldn’t stop thinking about, was that of being trapped or confined in a space or situation—sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively—the resulting exploitation of the situation and the way the characters find their way out…or don’t. In A Golden Light, the very first story in the collection, Sadie, on hearing about the death of her father becomes unable to move. In Mother, arguably the most unsettling story of the collection, a father, son, and daughter go out searching for mothers. In these examples, both Sadie and Mother are trapped in situations beyond their control, and while their resulting freedoms (I’m not spoiling, I promise!) differ wildly, there is deep commentary in these stories and in several others on the expectations society places on women—another thread that runs through the collection.

I am so grateful to ECW Press for sending me an ARC of this collection to review. It is beyond stunning, and I hope my words here have done it justice. Please go and read it and once you have, please come and talk to me about it! I desperately need to talk to someone about it.

The Girl Who Cried Diamonds is out October 3, 2023. PRE-ORDER NOW!