By SH Lim

Author: Adeline Lee Zhia Ern
Time Out rating: 3/5
Silverfish Books; RM30.00

There are reasons to celebrate this collection of short stories, and one of them is that the Ipoh, Perak writer, Adeline Lee, is barely 18 years old. She has just finished secondary school and is just now starting college. The publisher rightly notes that her ‘writing can only improve’, and that undoubtedly ‘she will continue to write and will become a major Malaysian author in the not too distant future’. She must keep on writing.

In this maiden collection of 20 very diverse imaginative creations, the writer shows that she has a deep well of stories to dip her pen into. She writes ghost stories and murder stories, and tales about both loving and strained familial relationships, missed opportunities, teenage angst and crime and punishment. While several of her narrators – male and female – are teens like herself, she has others who are one or two generations ahead of her, mothers with infants and folks at the end of their life’s journey looking back at the road they’ve taken. One of her narrator is even a teenage assassin, and in one story, ‘To Love You or to be Mad at You’, she adopts a rarely exploited second person point-of-view where the reader becomes a character in the story. That’s gutsy.

Adeline writes in a clean uncluttered prose style. Her sentences are not complex, allowing the story to move along, although occasionally she throws in words here and there which call attention to themselves and draw away from the narrative. Her style in some ways reflects her transparent worldview where what-is and what-appears-to-be coincide. Here people say what they mean and do what they say. Her narrators speak and observe in a voice that’s irony-free and as transparent as our August air after a morning thunderstorm.

Young writers need an understanding but demanding editor, someone who would not be over impressed by youthful talent and so make concessions. This collection’s major weakness lies in too much telling at the expense of showing. Some stories here span a lifetime, rather than a slice in time as permitted by the few pages to tell the story. The editor needs to be vigorous with his pencil and not allow a mistake like a title whose point-of-view differs from the story itself.