Of This New World by Allegra Hyde (University of Iowa Press, 2016)
At the end of “Free Love,” the third story in Allegra Hyde’s award-winning collection, the narrator, Almond, reflects on her lingering sense of alienation in her grandmother’s household: “But I still feel strung out, loose, like a fish on land, or a girl on the moon, or a flower no one recognizes taking root in an unexpected place” (39). This line encapsulates the ambivalent condition of the collection’s protagonists: They are unrecognizable flowers, girls on the moon, struggling to feel anchored as their quests for utopia falter.
