Review of Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takacs
Power to Yield and Other Stories by Bogi Takács (Broken Eye Books, 2024) is a beautiful collection of speculative fiction stories centering queer characters, Jewish characters, and sometimes characters who have become plants.
Standout stories in the collection for me included “And I Entreated,” which features a Jewish woman who has been converted into a houseplant while her non-binary child is preparing for their Bar Mitzvah, and captures a lot of parental and teenage frustration that felt quite relatable even to a non-parent. I also loved the flash fiction piece, “The Ladybug, in Flight,” which was absolutely lovely. “The 1st Interspecies Solidarity Fair and Parade” was a wonderful look at human and alien communities coming together, and “A Technical Term, Like Privilege” was equal parts heartbreaking and triumphant, as a graduate student in the absolute worst housing lease copes with their situation.
If you enjoy stories with fantastic characterization and just enough weirdness to make you doubt reality a little bit, check out Power to Yield and Other Stories!
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