The Price of Cookies by Finnian Burnett

I don’t know if I’d have read The Price of Cookies if the author hadn’t been so kind to me last summer at the GCLS conference. I don’t read many concise works, I didn’t know whether I’d enjoy flash fiction, 99.99% of the books I read have sapphic MCs, I rarely go for wider queer casts, etc. I would have missed out, though. Hugely. It’s impressive how such a short book can pack so much, in terms of characters, emotions, nuances.

There’s an entire world in these 36 pages, an entire universe. In a page or three, Burnett draws multiple slices of life, all interconnected, some more loosely than others.

In a few sentences, the reader is introduced to a whole array of characters and their feelings, as if they were entering a village and were suddenly privy to the lives being lived, in all their frailty and fallibility, the anger, the resentment, the frustration and pettiness, but also the hope, the compassion, the love. Human beings doing their best with whatever cards they were dealt.

Despite being nowhere near as long, The Price of Cookies is reminiscent of Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) and its more than six hundred pages. It also reminded me of a hand-clapping game/song in French called “Trois petits chats” or “Marabout, bout d’ficelle”. While Burnett’s novella in flash doesn’t follow the same stylistic device of having each part begin with the sound the one before ends on (dorica castra), the cookies have the same effect.

This masterful and poignant story of humanity, intolerance, and compassion came into my life at the perfect time. I haven’t been able to focus on reading recently (audiobooks seem okay), and the novella length felt less intimidating. I didn’t expect it to encompass so much, and even though it took me longer than I’d like to finish, it also made me want to read just one more page. And then just one more. And one more. Until suddenly the one more page was the last page and it had all come full circle, in the most satisfying way.