How To Tell If Your Frog Is Dead

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How To Tell If Your Frog Is Dead

A tour guide leads a Valentine’s Day-themed ghost walk, visiting the sites of horrific, yet romantic, deaths. A homicide cop solves tough cases using tips from his plants. Scientists discover a new species of religiously observant gophers, and a young math whiz, on the hunt for her escaped boa constrictor, ponders the theory of multiple worlds. Replete with dark humour and cheeky interrogations of philosophy and metaphysics, the thirty-three stories in How to Tell if Your Frog is Dead expose the fundamental absurdity of the human condition.

Reviews

The title story of Julie Roorda’s sixth book made me smile: the deadpan narrator explains the difficulty of maintaining the well-being of your pet African clawed frog and the life lessons it can teach your child when it doesn’t get what it needs. The next story involves a shy young man on a bus who sees an image of himself on the tablet of a woman sitting near him; in the photo they are clearly together, yet he is certain he has never seen her before. The one after that takes us on a Valentine’s Day Haunted Tour through Toronto. Plus 30 more similarly unhinged stories.

One of the most beguiling attributes of the short-story genre is its malleability. These stories are shape-shifters, tugging and testing the elasticity of the form in ways that often subvert readerly expectations.