An uneven collection from a writer who shows promise.
Five suburban step-families fall apart and reconnect in ten linked stories.
Pencil and paper ready? Here goes: Lu married Ward after Beatrix divorced him to marry Alan, who divorced Roxie to tie the knot. Moira married Ben after divorcing Tate, who now dates Roxie (see above). Tate’s sister Glynn, Moira’s ex-sister-in-law, married George. And then there are the kids: Liv, Alan and Roxie’s truculent, too-thin teenage daughter; Ward and Beatrix’s three sons: Devin, who refuses to speak in the presence of either parent, Britt, master of sarcasm, and Ollie, who cries; Ryan, Moira and Tate’s OCD handful, and Ashleigh, their 15-year-old sexpot (she dates Devin; see above); and Joey, Glynn’s son, who has more in common with Glynn’s new husband—especially a love of “Mortal Kombat” video games—than with her. Everyone lives nearby, in Oak Park, Ill. In the first three stories, “Loopy,” “Restoration” and “Ballad of the Barbie Feet,” YA novelist Ruby (Good Girls, Sept. 2006, etc.) begins to develop her many characters by moving a peripheral player from one story to the center in the next, and so on in the third. This deft technique deepens the stories’ competing personalities by letting the reader weigh the characters’ opinions about each other. Unfortunately, this daisy chain of narrative revelation breaks with the gimmicky fourth story, “Dear Psycho,” the collection’s weakest link. The remaining six stories, hampered by too many character sketches standing in for characters, are hit-or-miss: “Picture of Health” stretches so far out on one family tree’s limb—it introduces the girlfriend of a dead cousin—that its relevance to the whole fails to register. “Hug Machine” undermines Lu, otherwise the most appealing character of the lot. Only the title story, “I’m Not Julia Roberts,” in which a current and a former wife attempt to have an impossible conversation (think of the movie Stepmom), returns to the same storytelling élan of the opening three.
An uneven collection from a writer who shows promise.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57874-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
Many readers will see themselves in—and find themselves rooting for—the women in Malatji’s solid debut.
The complex romantic lives of South African women drive these astute short stories.
The women in Malatji’s collection are "black diamonds," members of the black middle class that sprang up after apartheid ended, or they're striving to join them. Though the stories are not connected, what unites them is each woman’s professional ambition and, more obviously, the compromises they are—or aren't—willing to make within their intimate relationships with men. If there is a statement that illustrates the spirit of the book, it’s this advice, given to Anna, the central character of the title story, by her mother: “My girl! You must know that to sustain marriage as a woman, you need a certain level of stupidity!” Whether a woman is willing to suspend her intelligence to placate a man is the core question of most of the stories. For many of the characters, the answer is an unequivocal "no." Suffering the male fools who populate their lives is something they decline to do, choosing to remain single, seemingly embracing the idea that “as much as we cannot survive without human affection, we also can’t survive on love alone.” For others, the decision is more complicated. In “My Perfect Husband,” a dutiful churchgoing wife is compelled to feign stupidity to aid her husband, who has brought tragedy to their lives. But the twist at the end is a satisfying high point, one of many examples Malotji presents of the gambits women make in the delicate dance that is romantic partnership. Woven into the insightful observations on love and relationships is the omnipresent tension between tradition and the ways that being a South African woman today challenges previously held ideas about women’s roles.
Many readers will see themselves in—and find themselves rooting for—the women in Malatji’s solid debut.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946395-03-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Catalyst Press
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
From British writer Mackay (Dunedin, 1993, etc.), an uneven collection of short stories that graphically expose the cruel realities of daily life. Set in the British wasteland of stopped drains, overgrown gardens, and stale fried fish that has become the preferred literary turf of contemporary English writers grappling with a national malaise, the stories range from the macabre to the downright nasty. A single woman's uneasy relationship with an immigrant shopkeeper ends in a bizarre murder (``Bananas''); Claudia, an aging writer living in the country, plans to kill her neighbor's children on Halloween (``The Thirty-First of October''); and a woman visiting her father in a nursing home dies during a struggle over a knife about to be used to cut pizza (``A Curtain with the Knot in It''). Three tales are particularly unpleasant: ``Angelo,'' in which an aging poet and beauty is brutally assaulted on her way home from her first lover's funeral; ``Perpetual Spinach,'' whose protagonists—a pair of kindly senior citizens injured in an accident—are neglected by yuppie neighbors who covet their house; and ``The Most Beautiful Dress in the World,'' a portrait of a distraught woman who murders the gas man in her despair. The best works in this collection are the title story (the only one that has appeared previously in the US), which shows a mystery writer suddenly recalling her own murderous past, and ``Cloud Cuckoo-Land,'' the chronicle of a do-gooder, accused of being out of touch with reality, who fears that he may be just ``an empty tracksuit filled with air.'' Taken as a whole, however, the constant parade of defeats and disasters gets pretty wearing. Much good writing, but not enough to make these tales of the down and out transcend schematic plotting and overworked emotions.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55921-121-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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