The Melting Grandmother — David Benjamin

Is GiGi—Biggy’s grandmother—a living repository of all past human adventures, or is she a liar? And will she keep shrinking until she disappears forever from the wonderful book-smelling room in her house on Lake StreetGiGi has told Biggy that she’s a thousand years old and that she went through the looking glass with Alice. She was a Spanish princess captured off a galleon by Blackbeard and she was a G.I. at the liberation of Auschwitz. She knew the Brothers Grimm and she was with Vonnegut during the Dresden firestorm. This all can’t be true but she explains it all so believably—and Biggy wants to believe. Especially, he wants to believe that GiGi will never die.In fourteen stories and sketches that dance from GiGi’s library to the mystic mountains of Japan and the deck of the Queen Mary, David Benjamin leads the reader through fields of imagination as fertile as the fancies of Biggy’s melting grandmother … an altar boy’s nightmare at eight o’clock Mass … the hellish deathscape of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945 … a comic murder mystery on the high seas … a troubled girl whose perfect breasts seem to live a life separate from her own … and “The Ballad of Hockomock Mick” … In all, a hodgepodge of mystery, comedy, horror, whimsy and surprise from “a gifted storyteller.”