ALICE FANTASTIC

Family is open to definition for three wildly unconventional women, their assorted lovers and a pack of rescue dogs.

Alice is a professional gambler, a loner with a serious knowledge of horseflesh. She’s debating whether to kick her latest lover, Clayton (aka “the big oaf”), to the curb when he more or less accidentally kills someone. Alice’s half-sister Eloise, both damaged and beautiful, makes strange stuffed animals that are only one manifestation of her curious intelligence. Their mother Kimberley could almost pass for the most normal of the three. A former wild girl, she is now living a clean and sober life in bucolic Woodstock, N.Y., where she looks after a motley assembly of unwanted dogs, several of which she palms off on her NYC-based daughters. When a series of crises brings Alice and Eloise to their mother’s Catskills retreat, they find more than a few surprises. The previously lesbian Kimberley has taken up with a male neighbor. She’s also started working for a local movie star, Ava, who takes a shine to the previously straight Eloise. Kimberley gives her daughters a shocker of a revelation that causes them to reconsider relationships and the few life plans they’d made. Estep (Flamethrower, 2006, etc.) brings her distinctive characters to lusty life with funny, profane prose. The emotional payoff, when it comes, is both warm and somehow wildly funny.

Fresh and surprisingly real.