A third collection from the ``postfeminist'' author whose previous works (Dog People, 1997, etc.) have established her as one of the quirkier voices on the scene today. As an editor of the Chick-Lit anthologies, Mazza has demonstrated great sensitivity to women's voices and women's cares, and these elements are certainly not overlooked here. Some of the pieces, like ``The Cram-It-In Method'' (which portrays a rather unworldly girl's preparations for her wedding to an even callower boy), examine feminine obsessions with men and families in tones that would be perfectly at home in Seventeen. Others, like ``The Career,'' which describes in a frank, harsh tone a naive teenager's extended affair with a brutish married man, will probably end up in one of Andrea Dworkin's footnotes somewhere along the line. ``The Something Bad'' follows a ``coupla-white-chicks-talking'' mode, in which three friends spend an afternoon ranting at each other about how their husbands have all turned out to be child molesters, and when will their boyfriends ever leave their wives, anyhow? Some of the works read more like fragments than stories: ``Dog & Girlfriend'' is the interior monologue of a girl dosing herself for a yeast infection she believes that she caught by sleeping with her best friend's father, while ``Laying Off the Secretary'' reads like the thought balloons for a comic strip on sexual harassment. The more ambitious stories work better: ``Adrenalin'' is an extraordinarily subtle portrait of how adultery saves the marriage of an unhappy young couple, and ``Copterport on Cowell's Mountain'' manages to make something out of the hopelessly overdone patient- and-shrink-scenario. A very mixed bag, but with some nice bits buried down deep. Mazza's talent can be striking when she chooses to exercise it.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57366-033-7
Page Count: 145
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers...
Exploring humankind's place in the universe and the nature of humanity, many of the stories in this stellar collection focus on how technological advances can impact humanity’s evolutionary journey.
Chiang's (Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) second collection begins with an instant classic, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” which won Hugo and Nebula awards for Best Novelette in 2008. A time-travel fantasy set largely in ancient Baghdad, the story follows fabric merchant Fuwaad ibn Abbas after he meets an alchemist who has crafted what is essentially a time portal. After hearing life-changing stories about others who have used the portal, he decides to go back in time to try to right a terrible wrong—and realizes, too late, that nothing can erase the past. Other standout selections include “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” a story about a software tester who, over the course of a decade, struggles to keep a sentient digital entity alive; “The Great Silence,” which brilliantly questions the theory that humankind is the only intelligent race in the universe; and “Dacey’s Patent Automatic Nanny,” which chronicles the consequences of machines raising human children. But arguably the most profound story is "Exhalation" (which won the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Short Story), a heart-rending message and warning from a scientist of a highly advanced, but now extinct, race of mechanical beings from another universe. Although the being theorizes that all life will die when the universes reach “equilibrium,” its parting advice will resonate with everyone: “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
Visionary speculative stories that will change the way readers see themselves and the world around them: This book delivers in a big way.Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-94788-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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