In her debut collection of fiction, Caitlin Vance doesn’t deconstruct the barriers between genres so much as insist that those barriers never existed: The Paper Garden shifts easily between folktale, horror, biblical satire, and realism. Many of the narrators are children, or adults revisiting childhood memories, which lends the collection a moral earnestness that is hard-won, multifaceted, and useful. With this collection, Vance proves herself to be a writer of singular invention and humanity, while her heartbreaking evocation of complex mother-daughter relationships puts her in a league of her own.

Male characters are sparse in this collection, and when they do appear, they seem almost incidental. The daughters — and they are always daughters in The Paper Garden — are left to parent themselves, their parents, and sometimes their grandparents. In one story, a child desperately tries to convince her grandmother to stop rolling up a hill. “ ‘The way back is up,’ her grandmother repeats, and begins once again rolling up the hill, the bones in her back and shoulders rattling.” In the title story, a father kicks his family out of the house so that he can live with his mistress. “That night, I heard Mom crying once again,” narrates the child from their new apartment:

[…] so I decided to make her a garden of paper like the garden we had at our old house [. . .] The next morning I noticed other paper structures next to the ones I’d made. I had no idea what they were. My mother said they were the other flowers, that I had forgotten some. She walked out of the room.

The psychological harm suffered by the children in this collection is rendered with both tenderness and brutality, and although the book abounds with women who are bad at mothering, Vance implies that there are no wicked mothers, only wicked contexts: teenagers forced out of school and into motherhood, women discarded by men, mothers offered no structural assistance, women trapped in poverty and mental illness and patriarchal obstacle courses. “Tulips,” the opening story of the collection, features a young, depressed mother whose boyfriend impregnated her in high school and then left her for another woman. This mother has a shadow in “I Can Tell What’s Real and What’s Pretend,” another story about a child born to a teen mom. Although these stories are told from the perspectives of the children, they suggest that the mothers and daughters were both thrust into a world of adult anguish, and that they both yearn for protection. In the opening of “I Can Tell What’s Real and What’s Pretend,” the child narrator, Anna, reveals that “[Mom’s] in the hospital because when nobody was watching, she went into the garage and tried to cut me out of her belly with a knife.” Anna explains that her mother makes this attempt regularly: “The mind hospital is in the basement of the body hospital, even though in real life the mind is like the top floor of the body.” During visiting hours, her mother makes a statement that could serve as an anthem for all the mothers in this collection: “Anna, it’s not you I want to hurt. I was just confused. Who I really want to hurt, actually kill, is the bad guy.”

Matter-of-fact American absurdism can also be found on occasion, especially in “The Miraculous Pregnant Virgin,” a delightful story that reimagines the Virgin Mary as a cussing, frightened, twelve-year-old spitfire who does not want to have God’s baby. Vance uses caricature to endear and complicate people rather than flatten them, and she is artful with slapstick: at one point, an angel appears to Mary as she’s contemplating an abortion. “ ‘Speak of the devil,’ Mary replied. The angel screamed, then made a cross out of his hands. He looked around frantically, but when he saw there was no devil around, he relaxed.”

This collection is populated by chiaroscuro stories, with high contrasts between humor, innocence, trauma, and misfortune. Vance usually achieves a balance between light and shadow, but her less successful stories have a tendency to plaster on tragedy until you can’t see much else. In “A Red Winter Shadow,” for example, Margaret takes a cold shower in a haunted apartment while hallucinating horrors and reckoning with her past, which includes: a dead mother, a fiancé who concealed his HPV from her, Margaret’s own diagnosis of HPV, an eating disorder, an abusive father, and an ex-fiancé who attempted suicide. When Margaret gets the call about her ex, she leaves her father at the hospital, relocating from one man’s deathbed to another. In the end, a ceiling fan starts to bleed. “A Red Winter Shadow” is rich with symbolism and has something important to say about death, rage, sexism, and mental illness. Had Vance practiced more of the restraint shown in other stories, “A Red Winter Shadow” might have succeeded more fully. It is easy to plunge a reader into absolute darkness, but difficult to show her anything once she’s there.

The stories in The Paper Garden are, on balance, deeply-felt, constructed with precision, and as enchanting as they are disturbing. Fairy tales begin when children are abandoned or betrayed by their caregivers. Vance adopts this starting point but rejuvenates the form, recasting the monster of yore with more recognizable ones: poverty, infidelity, predatory evangelicalism, sexism, mental illness, and death itself. The stories do not always do enough to subvert their original forms, and their conclusions can be heavy-handed, but the collection’s greatest achievement is its comprehensive empathy. In every story about mistreated children, Vance quietly illustrates that the adults, too, have been abandoned and betrayed. The author offers her wise, wry, and rebelliously hopeful voice to the blossoming genre of modernized folklore, and the genre is richer for it.

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