A vigorous, vibrant cluster of female-centered tales both captivating and immensely gratifying.
An author, entrepreneur, and linguist offers a collection of 13 female-narrated stories and skits featuring women of various ages, situations, and lifestyles.
The book leads off with one of the most impressive entries, “Brings on the Anxiety,” an actual quote from the aging lips of Rosella, a feisty, “illiterate southern lady” and former maid to a family that has dwindled in size over the years. It’s her birthday, and the grown children she previously cared for have arrived to help her celebrate. The tale is just a few pages in length but manages to convey characterization, mood, history, generational affection, and loss in an economy of swift, emotive prose. The placement of this story is key and becomes emblematic for the remainder of the enticing, well-rounded collection by White (The Rise of Dirck Becker, 2016, etc.). Female solidarity and friendship are a common theme coursing through the volume. Often, early childhood memories and bonds formed between kids become prognosticators for the adulthood years, as with the girl who meets and connects with a boy in a fifth grade drama class in “Licorice.” Though their link is fleeting, it marks a lifelong reminder for the narrator about the power of nondenominational, unconditional love. Still, not all interactions in these pages are friendly ones; some start off beautifully but sour or fester. Associations with the opposite sex are represented through cautionary tales like “Chopin’s Handkerchief,” in which a woman becomes infatuated with a former Italian language lab assistant from her college days in the 1980s only to discover his mental instability igniting a deep-seated fear she never realized she’d harbored. While this story generates a modest amount of suspense, it resists taking the audience to the darkest edges of obsession and perilous pursuit, as readers will expect, and, instead, concludes with notes of mystery and personal contentment. The collection’s emotional range is wide reaching, from the sadness of illness buffered by faith in “Send Us Help...Please” to the spicy hilarity of “Bon Appétit,” which finds a restless wife home alone during her husband’s lengthy business trip. The spirited narrative chronicles each day as it passes while the woman, a book designer, becomes more and more desperate and thirsty for human interaction, particularly from men. Her interior monologue peppered with sexual fantasies becomes laugh-out-loud funny by Day 5, when the randy wife is more than “ready to jump into the arms of any one of the guys I pass on the sidewalk.” On the opposite side of the spectrum, the title story, a melancholy affair, effectively explores themes of loss and disillusionment, as does the volume’s longest tale, “Don’t Push My Buttons.” Though they add variety, the two theatrical skits included lack the vitality and descriptive fullness of the stories surrounding them. Ultimately, this assemblage succeeds as a cohesive work of literary art, resulting in an addictive reading experience ideal for women eager for a book representative of the female experience as well as anyone who prefers the condensed, brisk rise and fall of short stories.
A vigorous, vibrant cluster of female-centered tales both captivating and immensely gratifying.Pub Date: May 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-4893-7
Page Count: 174
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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