These portraits are a welcome addition to the burgeoning canon of finely wrought female stories.
Cortese (Girl Power and Other Short-Short Stories, 2015) tells stories of young women on the cusp of adulthood, struggling to understand the social world.
In “Sweetness on the Tongue,” teenage Lily accompanies her mother, an acclaimed poet, to a writing conference. There, she deftly records her observations of the fellow attendees—including a charismatic young father and the teenage son of a novelist, who's eager for intimacy and connection. The narration shines when Lily voices the uncomfortable truths of her mother’s social performance but falters when the prose becomes too saccharine. This story sets the tone for the remainder of the collection, nearly all of which focuses on the relationships between young women and their parents, siblings, and casual interlopers. In “Firebug,” a pyrokinetic girl works to earn her sister’s trust to attend a school dance her sister is organizing. Her earnest desires elicit painful sympathy, though the metaphor of a flammable teenage girl is a bit on the nose. In “Welcome to Snow,” the narrator’s Sacred Heart High School linebacker brother, Simon, impregnates his girlfriend, Arlene, as the narrator attempts to forge a connection with Peter, the quarterback. Poignantly, the focus of the narrative shifts from the heterosexual romances to the intimate friendship between Arlene and the narrator, which is beautifully drawn. As the collection advances, similar narrators can feel interchangeable, but stories like “Straight and Narrow,” about a woman teaching a YMCA cooking class containing a recently released felon, break up the pattern and rescue the stories from monotony. The collection's strongest stories portray fragile romantic connections with unsparing criticism, voice uncomfortable truths about the way young people interact in modern culture, and ask questions about how girls approach freedom and desire.
These portraits are a welcome addition to the burgeoning canon of finely wrought female stories.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8131-7512-6
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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