ANIMAL WIFE

Girls and women caught between myth and the modern world.

Selected by Ann Hood as the winner of the Red Hen Fiction Award, Ehrlich’s debut collection contains 15 stories, some as short as a paragraph. Protagonists range from girls dealing with absent mothers, first kisses, and female friendships to grown women, mothers and would-be mothers themselves. Many feature animals (swan, deer, bear, raccoon, and more) or mythic creatures (the Marsh King, the Undertoad), and most have at least one foot in a liminal space between fantasy and reality, between what we dream of and what we’ll ultimately accept. A story called “Six Roses” handles this tension with a healthy dose of humor. “June’s holding out for a man like Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy, whose scorn masks a deep pain only she can heal. She wants a kiss that will stop the earth from spinning, with a man who would die for her. If they were stranded in the ocean with only one plank of driftwood between them, he would insist she take it, and comfort her as he froze to death. No eighth-grader can compete with that. Nathan Bagley never stood a chance.” In fact, it turns out he does, because reality has a way of winning. In “The Tenant,” a woman who is living happily with a hungry bear—she serves him dinner by candlelight—is heartbroken when he moves out. While “Foresight” imagines a substance that lets you see all your possible futures, it seems to concur with “Stone Fruit” about the disappointment at the end of the road: “Alice had wanted to sleep beneath the stars nestled in a gypsy’s arms. She’d wanted to travel the world and write a novel rivaling War and Peace. Now, she wants a house to grow old in.” The drifty way the stories unfold—a lack of narrative urgency—may keep some readers from digging in.

Whimsy and fantasy meet the way things really turn out in stories from a strong new voice.