Wonderful short stories I enjoyed each one Ling Ma writes so well her characters come alive her storylines drew me in.A wonderful entertaining collection.will be recommending.

Thank you to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Ling Ma for the e-ARC! This short story collection was fantastic. I read Severance beforehand to get a feel for Ling Ma’s writing style and these stories emphasized a lot of my favorite aspects of her novel. The range throughout this collection was stunning. There were many moments throughout reading this where I was thinking “what can’t she do?” From the realistic and mundane settings to the fantasy and sometimes disturbing storylines, she is absolutely brilliant and becoming one of my favorite current authors. I will be keeping an eye out for any and all future releases.

I was a bit torn on how to rate this collection of short stories, while they were all start off being very enticing, many of the endings fell flat. The first few stories also lacked distinctive voices, so they all kind of blurred together. The last three stories are definitely the strongest and left the biggest impressions on me.

I received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely LOVED this collection of stories. Ma explores so many facets of the human experience while weaving in a sense of whimsy and mystery. I will absolutely be picking up a copy of this collection to add to my library.

2.5 stars

Sad to say this was a total flop for me.

I read Ling Ma's Severance a couple of years ago and while, admittedly, it was not my favourite book ever, I still remember thinking that it had a lot of potential, and that it boded well for Ma's future releases. For that reason, I went into Bliss Montage cautiously optimistic, hoping that maybe what didn't work for me in a novel would work better in a short story collection. Needless to say, my hopes did not pan out.

I'm tempted to say I had two "issues" with Bliss Montage--one with its narrative voice, and one with its storytelling--but really these are less "issues" and more fundamental problems with the collection's writing as a whole. First, Ma's stories are all almost tonally identical; there is so little variety in their narrative voices. It feels like every story more or less has the same melancholic, impassive narrator: lost women who are Going Through It to various degrees but whose dry, flat narration makes you feel like they're all responding to their particular issues in the same way. On principle, I don't mind more distant or inscrutable narrators, but when every single story feels like it's a slight variation on one kind of narrator, then the collection starts to feel very one-note, and the stories start to blur together. This type of narrator might work in a novel with one POV because you have no other narrator to compare them to, but when I read a short story collection, I'm evaluating it on different terms than I would a novel: every story needs to distinguish itself, to stand on its own two feet. Narrative voice is one very noticeable way to do this--it's great when it's done well, but when it's not, as was the case here, it becomes very obvious very quickly.

So much for tone; where I run into issues next is in the actual storytelling: I found the stories of Bliss Montage to be opaque and just really unsatisfying. I've liked collections with more elusive short stories before (Meng Jin's Self-Portait with Ghost is one recent example that comes to mind); when done well, I think their opacity makes you gravitate towards them all the more, motivated in your attempts to try to see them more clearly. Bliss Montage's stories, though, shut me out rather than drew me in. I just couldn't for the life of me figure out what these stories were trying to say. I would start a story, and it would feel like it was going somewhere interesting, and then it would just end. The parts were somewhere in there, but the execution of the whole pretty much always fell flat for me.

Thematically, I'm not sure what this collection was going for. The synopsis says these stories are "eight wildly different tales," and I'm inclined to agree with that, though not really in a positive sense. I don't need every short story collection I read to be thematically cohesive--in a way, one of the attractions of short story collections is precisely the fact that they don't need to be thematically cohesive as a novel would; they give you the latitude to dip in and out of very different narratives without the investment that a longer piece of writing would ask from you. But even with all this in mind, the stories of Bliss Montage felt so disparate to me--a fact that was made even worse by the tonal similarity issue. So the stories all read like they're coming from the same narrator--or same kind of narrator--but the narratives themselves all feel so random. It was like I was reading random stories that were all being filtered through the same subjectivity, so even though the stories themselves were very different, they still ended up feeling very similar. Everything stood out, but also nothing stood out. It was a real lose-lose situation.

One last thing: I was so frustrated by how these stories' endings almost always left me hanging. Again, I don't categorically dislike vague or open-ended stories, but when every story ends right in the middle of things, it starts getting very annoying. It felt like these stories ratcheted up the tension, and then just went nowhere with it--the narrative equivalent of going up a rollercoaster without any of the emotional release of the actual going down part.

I wouldn't say I enjoyed this collection, but I'm also not discounting it as a whole because there were some glimmers here and there of things that I liked, or at least found interesting. The writing, for one, is occasionally sharp and perceptive, and I did end up highlighting a few passages that I thought were well written or insightful. There were also two stories that I think had some compelling themes, specifically "G" (about how women relate to their bodies, especially as those relationships tie into family, friendships, and culture) and "Pecking Duck" (about mother-daughter relationships and how they're [mis]translated in fiction). That's about all I have to say in terms of positives, though.

Anyway, I was really looking forward to this. It sounded so cool, and then I read the first story and was like "ok this is weird, but let's see where the collection is going," and then...it never went anywhere.

Thanks so much to FSG for providing me with an eARC of this via NetGalley!

Some of most loved short story collections lean hard into speculative and surreal situations that allow an author to make commentary on our current reality. Ma does this in <i>Bliss Montage</i>, leaning hard into the Asian immigrant and female identities.

My favorite stories included “Los Angeles”, where a woman lives with all her 100 ex-boyfriends, and “G”, which showed what a toxic frenemies relationship changing under the influence of a drug that makes the user invisible. The final “Tomorrow” story lacked a speculative element, but I felt was a powerful look back at how two people can interpret the same experiences.

Overall, I thought the collection were fresh albeit dark. I hold back from 5-star because I felt quite a few of the endings simply faded away; I was hoping they’d leave a bit more of a punch.

Also - love the cover. I’d totally pick it up in a bookstore display.

I voluntarily obtained a digital version of this book free from Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in exchange for an honest review.

The author of Severance is back with a collection of eight stories, and her best entries are the extremely weird ones, starting with the opening text about a woman living with her husband and her 100 ex-boyfriends. Ling Ma's world is haunted by all kinds of ghosts, many of them prompted by the immigrant experience and female realities, and it's her witty, often dark playfulness that make her angle so absorbing: From a young wife who joins her husband in his journey to his home country of Garboza (outside the novel non-existent, but somehow pointing to...Star Wars?) where she gets abandoned at the airport to old frenemies taking a rather unusual drug.

More conventional tales like "Peking Duck"about the intergenerational effects of migration aren't bad, but Ling Ma shines when she goes all out, intersecting the underlying grimness of her themes with humorous remarks and small tidbits that throw readers off.

A fun collection, but I can't wait for this author's next novel.

Bliss Montage is an engaging collection which transitions from realistic and tender stories to bizarre storylines flawlessly. It is personal, heartfelt and honest, with beautiful prose throughout and intelligent commentary on the Asian diaspora and women's experiences with race, love and their bodies.

Great selection of short stories! I honestly thought it read really quickly but I still keep thinking about the story so I can always tell that that means it’s good. Another great win for this author!