Sympathy for Wild Girls
Stories
Demree McGhee’s Sympathy for Wild Girls is an atmospheric short story collection about the restlessness of Black girls and women.
Attentive to queer Black femininity, this collection centers those who are discontent with love, friends, family, and themselves. In the opening story, Daisy, frightened by her mother’s cautionary stories of victimized Black girls, runs away to join the coyotes. In “She Is Waiting,” Ava’s girlhood kidnapping causes her to float, having a dire effect on her college friendships and romance.
The book is filled with restless dread, as when Black women and girls are haunted by graphic images of squirming carrion and monstrous creatures. The gradual unveiling of an isolated girl’s fixation on reviving dead animals instills creeping body horror in “Scratching,” narrated by a grieving school nurse. “Thinning” is an intimate examination of a woman’s growing obsession with her weight amid gym and diet culture, escalating toward dizzying internal descriptions of an eating disorder.
The depictions of Black women and their romantic and platonic relationships with other women are uneasy, even cruel, resisting easy catharsis. The mother in “A Matter of Survival” admits to her rebellious daughter “I could beat you … Breath iron sharp. I won’t because I love you, but I could.” Later, she sends the girl to her grandmother after discovering her intimacy with another girl. Tempestuous relationships are perhaps most fleshed out in “Be Good,” in which a woman who’s resentful of her mother escapes cross-country and forms a blunt partnership with a conservative Christian influencer who treats the woman’s Black hair’s dandruff in exchange for her silence about the influencer’s sex life, given her public espousal of chastity.
Sometimes gruesome and morbid, the short stories in Sympathy for Wild Girls dissect the discomforts and dissatisfactions of queer Black women.
Reviewed by
Isabella Zhou
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
