A Collection of Tiny Stories: Diminutive Tales From The Tips of My Imagination by C.K. Sobey; The School of Optimal Futures by Annie Flint

 

A Collection of Tiny Stories: Diminutive Tales From The Tips of My Imagination by C.K. Sobey; The School of Optimal Futures by Annie Flint 

By Julie Sara Porter 

Bookworm Reviews 

 

A Collection of Tiny Stories: Diminutive Tales from The Tips of My Imagination by C.K. Sobey

This review is a summary. The entire review can be found on Reader Views.

Sometimes writers can say much with very few words. That's what C.K. Sobey demonstrates with the anthology A Collection of Tiny Stories: Diminutive Tales from The Tips of My Imagination. Sobey presents 24 short stories no longer than one or two pages or a few paragraphs to describe a conflict, a setting, a character, or a specific moment. 

A babysitter discovers dark secrets about her neighbor. A bookworm receives a personal message from their latest book. A woman receives a newspaper with a prophetic story. A woman writes to her husband during WWI. A little girl wants a new doll for her birthday. A janitor longs for a different path in life. An abusive man encounters a witch. Workers make the most of the dockyard night life. A woman finds an abandoned teddy bear and takes it home with her.

Sobey doesn't use many words. The words that are used capture those brief flickering moments which dare readers to read, visualize, and understand a brief point in time. They are descriptive, lyrical, visceral, and skillful in depicting a single lasting image within each story.

The School for Optimal Futures by Annie Flint

This review is a summary. The entire review can be found on LitPick.

The School for Optimal Futures by Annie Flint book is a YA dystopia science fiction novel that acknowledges the conflict between the domineering authority figures and the young courageous rebels but also comments on many of our current conflicts with technology, government overreach, and education.

 Ginger is sent to The School for Optimal Futures, an elite bizarre private school. The curriculum is strange. The faculty are very secretive and students disappear. Ginger and her new friends, Zoe, Matty, and Aiden discover a conspiracy between the school’s founder and the tech company that owns the school and the nearby town. 

The School for Optimal Futures gives a pleasant exterior but is questionable internally. It has a beautiful campus, interesting curriculum, welcoming students, supportive faculty, but it's all surface.

There is something performative and uncomfortable about the whole situation, like the school is playing the part of a welcoming empathetic place for misfits and outsiders but isn't really. Things like constant surveillance and.missing students and faculty members are highly suspicious plus a giant tech company has complete control over the school.

 The book’s plot is a savage commentary on surveillance, corporate control, and the manipulation of educational standards to serve the goals of the oligarchs and the world they strive to create. The school is written as a microcosm of what is already being done on a larger scale by large corporations who focus on gain and control rather than humanity and preservation.

The School for Optimal Futures calls to attention many of the real-life world problems but also offers ways in which they can be countered, challenged, changed, and maybe defeated.