We're Safe When We're Alone

"This hypnotic and richly allusive novella can be read as a concentric poem that hints at both hope and inevitable endings: A boy, fearing for his mother’s death from cancer, agrees to travel with his father to “the other world” for a chance of saving her. Yet the story also reflects the boy’s foreboding sense of his father’s demise or imminent absence when the two of them are in this other world, which can also stand for a foreign country. His fear of “ghosts” lurking outside the home with infinite power to take him away from his father seems to represent an immigrant/refugee child’s fear of turning into an assimilated other that would make him a stranger to his family."