January 4, 2021
Cohen’s wonderfully bizarre debut collection explores identity, sexuality, and relationships through a series of stories about characters named Sarah. In the title story, college student Sarah A. breaks free of her social clique and is increasingly drawn to a rebellious acquaintance in a narrative that may remind readers of the film Heathers. “Exorcism, or Eating My Twin” features a 26-year-old Buffy fan fiction writer named Sarah who meets her “twin” in an English literature PhD candidate. She calls her Tegan after the two sing a Tegan and Sarah song for karaoke, as a code to describe their budding relationship (“it was like we had encountered the musical theater demon and could only give language to our feelings through... pop lyrics”). An older Sarah transforms into a tree in the peculiar “Becoming Trees.” The eerie “The Purple Epoch” concludes the book and imagines a world where new creatures are born from the remains of past Sarahs. Throughout, Cohen cleverly reimagines the world through a queer lens and uses pop culture and fairy tale references to illustrate the various lives, stories, and worlds the Sarahs can inhabit. A thought-provoking work, Cohen’s collection surprises and excites. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore & Co.
Starred review from December 1, 2020
In Cohen's debut, she explores queer identity through multiple lenses in a collection of short stories that push the boundaries of fiction. The protagonists of Cohen's stories are connected by one very specific attribute: They are each named Sarah, or some variation thereof. This seems, perhaps, like a strange premise for a collection, but the stories are bound together as well by a deep thematic interest in the multidimensionality of the self--especially the queer, Jewish, nonmale self--and the sometimes overwhelming number of possibilities of how a person or a life might be transformed. From a queer reimagining of the story of Abraham and Sarah from Genesis to a Jewish university freshman struggling against the constraints of compulsory heterosexuality to a young woman whose aspirational infatuation with the idea of horse camp allows her to transcend her human form, Cohen's stories are profoundly original. While some hew closer to realism and others are more imaginative, they are each narrated in distinct voices and rendered in dreamy, glistening prose. Some of the collection's more experimental stories manage to reach into the realm of the metaphysical, exploring possibilities of being and alternate universes; Cohen manages to do this in a manner that, remarkably, does not feel overwrought. As with any collection of stories, some feel more fully realized than others; this is perhaps exacerbated by the protagonists' shared name, with the less memorable Sarahs fading into the background, their stories blurring together. But in general, Cohen's book is impressively even, particularly for a debut. A bold collection that explores how we might break free from or reimagine ourselves and our places in the universe.
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