"Goto creates a complex emotional landscape for her protagonist, woven from Japanese mythology, the Little House books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the complexities of filial and sibling relationships in a dysfunctional family. A collector of abandoned shopping trolleys, she has attempted to close the book of her childhood, but it insists on returning to haunt her. Also haunted by a phantom pregnancy after an encounter with a mythical stranger, she restarts her stalled life as she gestates her Kappa Child, coming to understand that the story she has told of herself is somewhat at odds with the stories of those with whom she shared her childhood and the few friends with whom she has tentative arms-length relationships.

This is a lyrically beautiful book which blends fairytale and narratives grounded in the everyday experience of Japanese-Canadians struggling to grow Japanese rice on the dry Canadian prairies. Without shrinking from exploring the ways in which familial violence can damage both victims and perpetrators, The Kappa Child is nonetheless a story of healing." ~Joan Haran

"A fairy tale that's well worth the wait. . . .Goto handles her theme with lightness and a sense of compassion that is, sadly, rare in contemporary fiction." ~Alberta Views

"Highly imaginative." ~World Literature Today

Awards

• Otherwise Award (formerly known as James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award for Science Fiction)
• Commonwealth Writers' Prize Nomination
• Sunburst Award Nomination for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic

The unbearable voices of mythic manatees, the cry of the phoenix, the whispers of kappa lovers beside a gurgling stream. The voice of the moon that is ever turned away from our gaze, the song of suns colliding. The sounds which permeate from my skin on such a level of intensity that mortal senses recoil, deflect beauty into ugliness as a way of coping. And my joy. Such incredible joy. The hairs on my arms stand electric, the static energy and the heat amplifies my smell/sound with such exponential dizzying intensity, that the plastic which surrounds me bursts apart, falls away from my being like an artificial cocoon.

I hover, twenty feet in the air.

The title of Hopeful Monsters refers to genetically abnormal organisms that naturally adapt to their environments. In Hiromi Goto's quietly devastating stories, the hopeful monsters in question are women confounded by familial duty and the ghosts of their past.

As mothers, daughters, wives, and "stinky girls," they are the walking wounded—a mother terrified by a newborn daughter who bears a tail; a woman who cannot breast-feed without pain; three generations of women who dream of lives that are not their own. But their wills are a force of nature unto themselves, and their struggles for selfhood are imbued with the light of myth and magic-realism. In these tales of domestic crises and cultural dissonance, Goto makes the familiar seem strange, and deciphers those moments when the idyllic skews into the absurd, the sublime, even the horrific.

Alternately poignant and noisy, these stories establish Hiromi Goto's gift for short fiction that is as shining as her acclaimed novels.

These are stories that, without resorting to too much supernatural trickery, truly deliver both a disturbing frisson and a psychological punch. ~Quill & Quire

Stunning, like small diamonds adorning a beautiful hand. The stories' often weird endings take Margaret Atwood's technological fictions several steps closer to the macabre into a sort of "Twilight Zone" of postmodern family life that mostly features postfeminist women at their fickle witchiest.~The Multicultural Review

If you loved Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, you'll love this book...~The Calgary Herald

The writing is sleek in its economy but pointed in its observation. Yet often a metaphor will bloom into something sublimely sensual. Goto knows how to take her characters into hard places. You won't like all of them—but you won't want to leave them alone. Gorgeous.~Now Magazine