Have You Read This? Sing Your Sadness Deep by Laura Mauro

Fantasy that begins in the real world often has a gateway. One goes into a wardrobe to enter Narnia. Platform 9¾  is how many students find the train that takes them to Hogwart’s. Simply reading The Neverending Story is one’s gateway into Fantasia. These realms of fantasy are often places where one escapes the mundane and various real-world issues, there are some worlds that have their own problems, and sometimes they are worse. Laura Mauro’s short story collection Sing Your Sadness Deep isn’t a gateway into one world, but several little entryways into sinister worlds of magical realism, its characters sometimes pulled in unaware or against their will.

The people in Mauro’s tales aren’t your typical protagonists in fantasy stories. They don’t have the fantastic come to them through a magical wish upon a star, but one could argue they’d be deserving of one. They are immigrants struggling to get by in London, they are souls tormented by unrequited love, and children destined to fall through the cracks of a stressed-to-the-breaking-point education system.  The fantastic isn’t really an escape, however, but another issue that they must contend with. A little girl in the tale “Obsidian” must deal with something beneath a lake that wants her sister while also dealing with her sister’s special needs and a mother working too much to be available. “Letters from Elodie” is about a woman trying to make sense of her friend Elodie’s suicide, not just wondering what had happened to her but who she really was. “Sun Dogs” shows a doomsday prepper’s life turned upside down by something that she isn’t prepared for: loving a very mysterious woman. These stories aren’t about happily ever after, or even necessarily discovering something about yourself. These stories seem to show that life, even when the fantastic decided to intervene, is cruel, sometimes it is doubly cruel when something out of the ordinary comes along but still leaves the protagonist of these stories with the same or even worse issues.

However, these stories aren’t cynical parodies of fairy tales, but rather beautifully told tales with less-than-happy endings. The title is a reference to one of the stories in the collection, but it could also apply to how the language of these stories sing a beautifully haunting melody that still plucks and even tears at the heartstrings. Mauro’s gift of language evokes a musical pull that lets you follow these characters off the path of the mundane, no matter how dark the path to the fantastic gets. It evokes magical realism but focuses heavily on the soul-crushing reality.