Scrabble Lessons is deeply affecting and gorgeously written. As a writer, reading her is like holding on to fire works. It’s a thrill to be so fondly jealous you never wrote these stories yourself. No detail is left blandly described, and it is all so fresh and vivid. Example: “The tears started, big fat drops cutting inside her cheekbones and taking the easier nose-side route,” and you know what she means. You know she sat back in her chair and saw all her scenes and never missed a thing in describing them; it’s like she’s writing from the inside out. Where most writers might say Gary was confused, or Gary was disoriented, she’d say “Gary felt like he’d stepped inside some weird foreign film, like he should be looking around for subtitles to make sense of it all.” Even each gesture is given a unique visual. For example: “She shook her head like there were flies buzzing around it” or “She held her fingers ruler straight.”

Take the opening story, “Scrabble Lessons.” The detail is there, she talks about the clinking sound of the tiles as she hears her mother and grandmother playing scrabble in another room, and describes everything in a way you see; she really puts you there with lines like: “Rob was two-handing his beer glass like it might get away from him.” And there is some sort of harsh, intentionally paradoxical contrast in many of the lines in this story: a lot of the most vivid violent sentences are played off so casually. Example: “Just about the time the steering wheel was punching through Dad’s chest, Mom was joining VELO to CITY, her V boldly claming the red square of a triple word score.” You get a juxtaposition of the violent, unfathomable death of her father laid over the mundane, everyday routines of her life, except this day, her father dies in a car accident and with these sentences stacked the way they are, you really get a sense of the narrator’s shock via Vryenhoek’s command of language and lingual wizardry. When her mother shares her scrabble wisdom, or lessons, is it not a metaphor for life, done in a subtle way for the deeper reader? A clever parallel between the game of scrabble and the game of life; the approaches to each.

I could make some half-apt and flattering comparisons, so that anyone reading this might get a feel for this book. I could say, “Scrabble Lessons is Lisa Moore’s short fiction meets Kathleen Winter’s,” but there’s something here that’s all Leslie Vryenhoek’s, and that’s what excited me the most. A new voice, and I love it. This is a perfect collection of short stories: punchy, top-notch creative writing that makes you feel something. Jammed in around all these skilfully constructed sentences is raw emotion you feel, seeping out through the words. These are stories you feel as a reader and admire as writer.