"When Life Hands You a Lemon Fruitbomb" by Amerie (from a Phoenix First Must Burn) for Timeslip Tuesday

When I saw this call to Blackout besteller lists with black voices yesterday, a trip to my local bookstore was inevitable.

I checked to see that the two books I knew I wanted to read (The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and A Song of Wraiths and Ruin, by Roseanne A. Brown) were both in stock, and they were, but by the time I reached the bookstore, they weren't anymore. Which is good, I guess, and it meant I had to browse the shelves (which I don't mind), and my eye was caught by A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic, Resistance, and Hope, edited by Patrice Caldwell (YA, Viking Books, March 10, 2020), which of course I happily bought.

The very first story, "When Life Hands You a Lemon Fruitbomb" by Amerie, is a time slip story, and so it's the subject of today's post.   But it hurts to spoil it by saying what happens, because it's so good and the twist is lovely.  So I won't go into much detail, and you can just go ahead and buy this lovely anthology yourself if you want to read the story as it should be read!

However, in order to have a post about the time slip-ness of the plot, I have to write about it. So.

It's a story of Earth being invaded by aliens, nicknamed "orcs."  Earth fights back, and two brave black girls are among the humans who travel through a wormhole to push back against the invaders.  They are both serving as interrogators, trying to find information about their enemy that can save earth.  But the wormhole has taken them back in time, and there is no humanity on Earth to save this far back in the past.  There's only a distant plant, and the orcs, and legend the orcs have of something that will come to pass in the future.  And the two girls take the steps that will make that happen.

And, even biggest spoiler, the thing they will make happen is the orcs invasion of Earth, and the trip through the wormhole, each iteration creating an alternate beginning.  (Time travel via sci fi wormhole doesn't happen in YA very often, by which I mean I can't think of another example).

I needed that spoiler to make my main comment--it was such a brilliant placement of this story as the first one in this collection, because of course it leads into all the other fifteen alternate realities full of black girl magic that follow.

It's a great story, as are many of the other 15.  Some I liked more than others, but it's really strong collection, and there were several I loved.  But this one, I think, is my favorite.

(the second book I bought was Kingdom of Souls, by Rena Barron, which I had also been wanting to read!)