Tomb Sweeping by Alexandra Chang is a collection of short stories that will move an active reader to ponder lives and life choices, especially as many poor choices here are made for fully understandable reasons.

Admittedly these won't appeal to every reader. Ones who need complete closure and if they don't feel closure believe that means there is no closure may not enjoy the fact these stories are meant to stay with you as a sort of present rather than the basic, though quite effective as well, tendency of many stories to stay with you as you consider only what happened in the past, meaning in the fully contained story. Some readers need that feeling of having the pretty bow at the end, some of us are content to be given the ribbon and tie the bow ourselves.

Even the fantastical stories seem grounded in the real, so the characters are relatable while the circumstances, even when far removed from what most of us have experienced, also remain relatable as well. We can understand dealing with traditions we don't fully embrace, setbacks in life that could seriously derail our future plans, disappointment in conditions we thought would be different. This all allows us to relate, even if we think we wouldn't do the same things, to the characters and their plights.

I'm not sure any collection has to have a common theme, especially an explicit one. If you read these stories actively, however, you will find a theme in the types of characters and the situations they find themselves in. No, it isn't all cookie cutter, and the term I might use and the sentiment I might have may well be different from yours. What you will find is that they are not all the same, even if one could argue the world of each story (as in "the world of the work" and not simply China or San Francisco) carries similar emotional undertones. Those undertones, that similar yet slightly different feeling you get from each story is, if you need a "theme" to understand a collection of short stories, that theme.

I would recommend this to readers who like to tie their own bows at the end of stories and don't necessarily need everything pre-packaged for easy consumption. Active readers will have several of these stories stay with them for some time.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )