| Edition |
First Scribner hardcover edition. |
| Description |
225 pages ; 23 cm |
| Contents |
Brides -- Nine -- Economics -- Sex scenes from a chain bookstore -- Captain's Club -- Lot like fun -- Company of strangers -- Take care -- Femme -- Allegiance -- Boys and girls like you and me. |
| Summary |
Kyle, whose first novel, The God of Animals (2007), was selected as an Alex Award winner, turns her creative energy and dark imagination to shorter fiction in her second book, producing 11 stories that are irresistibly readable in the same way that a goiter or a carbuncle demands careful scrutiny. The girls, young women, and, in one case, 12-year-old boy who serve as protagonists are or soon will be unrelievedly miserable, disappointed by life, betrayed by love, and convinced -- like Lilly in "Company of Strangers" -- that they they will "die horribly." As she did in her novel, Kyle reinforces the bleakness of mood and tone with loving descriptions of unsavory settings (a school is "a dirty scab of a place"; skies are "the color of concrete"; and air smells like "grease and diesel fumes"). There is an almost perverse artistry at work here, however, and at least two of the stories -- "Nine" and "A Lot like Fun" -- are near-perfect exercises in persuading readers that the hallmark of human nature is imperfectability and that truth is its ultimate falsehood--Booklist. |
| Subject |
Women -- Fiction.
|
|
Girls -- Fiction.
|
|
Humorous stories, American.
|
| ISBN |
9781416594802 |
|
1416594809 |
|
9781416594819 |
|
1416594817 |
|
