Sadly, stories with a potential too insufficiently realized to deliver sustenance.
From novelist Quinn (High Strung, 2003), an oddly flat first collection that deals mostly with overly familiar domestic issues.
In “Dough,” a young woman with a “peaceful father” and a mother who went overnight from showgirl to paralegal, spends time with her grandmother, who has “rosebud nostrils” and is suffering from dementia. Her mother comes by one evening and catches the girl in flagrante with her boyfriend, a bread maker. Yet the story is too quiet to be memorable. A woman’s experience of rape is associated in her mind with CNN’s reports of American astronauts, ideas that merge in a conclusion that doesn’t work (“Back on Earth”). In “Endurance Tests,” a divorced mother connects her young son’s episodes of playing dead after his dog dies with the endurance tests she and a girlfriend tried with each other when they young, concluding that nothing was enough to prepare them for adult life. The inconclusive “Shed This Life” follows a woman whose parents died when she was in high school as she now leaves a boyfriend she met in the dentist’s office (where she works) after she let him know she’s pregnant. Dalton’s language is too pat (“Ted is looking at me like a man not quite recovered from Novocain, mouth breathing and he doesn’t even know it”), her character’s motivations unclear. “How to Clean Your Apartment” gives us a young woman trying to break up with a boyfriend while drinking whiskey and preparing to throw out clothes, gifts, junk. It’s saved from dullness by witty index subheads (“Screening calls: brief arguments for, 7.61”; “Therapy, cheaper alternatives to, 9:07”) but closes with the same old ending. The overlong title story gives an account of the narrator’s breakup with her boyfriend, told in tandem with the saga of her parents’ separation, her mother’s depression and her grandmother’s controlling temperament. Dalton gives each equal weight, robbing her tale of drama and emotion.
Sadly, stories with a potential too insufficiently realized to deliver sustenance.Pub Date: April 19, 2005
ISBN: 0-7434-7055-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A first collection of stories with great first lines, usually followed by fictions as light as air—some antic or absurd, others delicate or touching. The title piece is one of the best: a good-humored comedy about an Indiana girl out West, a sort of bounty hunter looking for cheerleaders in the mountains who've never been seen but ``were part of the mountain mythology.'' ``Better Be Ready 'Bout Half Past Eight'' is both hilarious and moving: `` `I'm changing sex,' Zach said.'' That first line starts off an absurd chain of events as seen through the eyes of Zach's best friend. Zach, who becomes Zoe, is finally forced to say, ``I think you're letting this come between us.'' Baker's tone, light but not frothy, is just right. But those two stories are the high points here; others are slick entertainments, albeit with sober undercurrents: ``The Spread of Peace'' (first line: ``If peace spreads, Heather may lose her job'') is about a weapons designer at the end of the cold war who's also faced with a lump in her breast; ``My Life in the Frozen North'' is a mock explorer-narrative told by a young woman, ``the child of explorers,'' who learns that ``The law of life in the Frozen North is Eat,'' and comes to realize, sadly, that her parents ``discovered nothing''; and ``Clearwater and Latissimus'' is the moving story of Siamese twins, told by a naive (and ``normal'') fellow student. Other pieces here are shapeless or cutesy, but the best are luminous with verbal play and intimations of how ordinary strangeness can be. (Some have appeared in Atlantic, the Best of the West, New Stories from the South and various lit mags.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-8118-0324-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Four connected long stories from Le Guin (A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, 1994, etc.) featuring the planets Yeowe and Werel, the latter a slave-owning oligarchy, the former its colony. Contact by the wise, multi-planet space civilization, the Ekumen, lends impetus to revolutions on both worlds. The slaves of Yeowe oust their brutal Bosses after a savage seven-year struggle; later, the slaves of Werel rise up to topple their Owners. But on Yeowe the women discover that they have overthrown the Bosses only to be oppressed by their own menfolk; and so begins their slow but implacable fight for equality. In "Betrayals," the disgraced but enlightened revolutionary Abberkam finds redemption in his burgeoning love for the teacher Yoss. "Forgiveness Day" tells the tale of Solly, the Envoy of the Ekumen of Werel, who, at the beginning of the slaves' revolt, is kidnapped and imprisoned with punctilious but honorable soldier Teyeo, her bodyguard. Havzhiva of Hain, Solly's assistant, is "A Man of the People" who helps the women of Yeowe with their own nonviolent revolution. And "A Woman's liberation" is narrated by Radosse Rakam, born a slave on Werel, eventually to become instrumental in the women's revolution on Yeowe—and Havzhiva's beloved. Whether constructing a moving and expressive love story, or articulating the feminist subtext, there is no more elegant or discerning expositor than Le Guin.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 006076029X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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