Review of Toti O’Brien’s Alter Alter by Katerina Canyon
Alter Alter by Toti O'Brien knows that true mysteries require silence more than spectacle, and the metaphysical here is rendered with remarkable restraint.
Every piece in Alter, Alter is saturated with intelligence and heart.
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In Alter, Alter, Toti O’Brien has woven a luminous, uncanny fabric of the intimate and the mythic—stories that feel as though they were whispered across centuries, yet rooted in the tender wounds of modern life. The prose is lyrical and exacting, capable of sudden sharp turns, like memory itself. In the stories “Cassandra,” “Ulysses,” “Her Wish,” and others, O’Brien offers not just narratives, but encounters—brushes with fate, brushes with death, and always, brushes with longing.
“Cassandra” is emblematic of O’Brien’s gift: a quiet vision layered with ancestral grief and psychic echoes. A woman collapses from an inexplicable pain, only to later learn her grandmother died at that same moment. The grief is not overwrought—it pulses through the text like a faint signal, a grief that doesn’t demand attention but refuses to disappear. The metaphysical here is rendered with remarkable restraint, as if O’Brien knows that true mysteries require silence more than spectacle.
In “Ulysses,” we are introduced to a repairman whose mythic presence threatens to unravel reality itself. His cobalt eyes, his ancient lullaby in a foreign tongue—this is Odysseus disguised as a working-class saint, come not to fix an appliance, but to quietly remind the narrator that salvation and self-sufficiency are closer than we think. The story hums with subtle mythology, each line dense with emotional implication.
And then there is “Her Wish,” a story that wrestles with aesthetics, conformity, and the subtle tyrannies of parenting. Borbora, a child who dreams of red ballet shoes, is quietly and persistently shaped by her mother’s beliefs about taste, grace, and what it means to belong. The final images of the story—a child silenced in a mirror, the body blurred and half-erased—are haunting. O’Brien’s insight into the violence of socialization is profound, and her prose, even in its softest cadences, cuts with surgical precision.
“Girl by the River” and “Landing” unfold with the gravity of late-life reflection. Here, O’Brien meditates on aging, illness, and the eerie mirroring between the decay of trees and the decay of the human body. These stories are more introspective, but no less lyrical. They remind us that the sacred isn’t confined to youth or revelation—it lingers in the details of daily life, in rustling leaves, in forgotten corridors, in the quiet of a too-late apology.
These are only a few examples of the lush, beautiful stories found in this collection. Every piece in Alter, Alter is saturated with intelligence and heart.
O’Brien’s characters are haunted by more than memory—they are haunted by what could have been, by a deeper knowing they can’t quite name, by the echo of something just out of reach. This is a book that aches. It sings.
O’Brien’s characters are haunted by more than memory—they are haunted by what could have been, by a deeper knowing they can’t quite name, by the echo of something just out of reach. This is a book that aches. It sings.
Katerina Canyon
