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seeceeread's review against another edition
I find it hard enough to compromise with the facts of living: a need for vitamins, the ringing telephone. Life yells: accept me, take care of this, you're not paying attention. Compromise with a person? Out of the question.
A runaway father who seems genuinely confused about why his son won't hug him, decades later. A near-comatose wife whose first intelligible syllables to her husband are about his waistline. A child prodigy who, as an adult, feigns stupidity about everything and refuses to answer most questions. A woman without arms, who, once reunited with a little person who performed beside her at the circus, must confront her children's ableism. An elderly man who killed his wife decades ago, and now paroled, struggles to forge bonds in the present.
McCracken mines intensely awkward and painful moments for onyx humor. She neatly contextualizes oddballs, clarifying just why people don't quite fit together – substantive differences in age, size, temperament – while letting their friction generate its own momentum.
Many lovely sentences are best understood as part of a McCracken funhouse tale. She slips in a lil social commentary but this is mostly a collection of absurd premises dressed in thoughtful detail. I enjoyed following the author down each narrow, ridiculous passage, as well as where we arrived.
mcgriddles's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
3.75
Some stories were better than others. Unconventional characters are the stars of each story, but the writer’s craft makes the stories somehow seem very normal. Particularly fond of Secretary of State and the last one in the series Of the Goings-on of the World:
Please consider these words:
do you remember,
they mean everything
Do you remember
is the game sweethearts and friends play
And strangers from the same college who meet at the bus stop
Married people lead a life of it, I guess
Do you remember our meeting? Our courting? Our parting?
There’s something so personal and lovely, and casual in that line
It was something that no one had said to me for 50 years…”
minty's review against another edition
4.0
While reading books of short stories, you're always looking for a connecting thread--this one, focused a lot on found family, inviting those who have no one else into your own, and, oddly, the circus, was inventive and touching. You could tell some were a bit of an exercise, and others teased out similar themes in new ways.
adaflermeaux's review against another edition
4.0
Reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor. Loved these stories!
pedantic_reader's review against another edition
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
3.75
kevinjfellows's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
samantha's review against another edition
4.0
The last two stories of this collection, in particular, are knockouts.
jessrock's review against another edition
4.0
I'd read Elizabeth McCracken's collection of short stories, Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry, a few years before, but by the time I picked it up this week while looking for something attention-deficit friendly, I couldn't have told you anything about any of the stories in the collection. I think the best way I can describe these stories, then, is that I would get a page or two into some of them and think how much they reminded me of some really good story I'd read sometime in the past. Of course, the story was reminding me of itself, and I'd realize that after another page or two.
There are nine stories in total, and some of them are somewhat throwaway, but there are a few of them that really make the book worth reading. I think my favorite was "Mercedes Kane," about a mother who wishes she were a genius, a grown-up child prodigy trying desperately to be normal, and a daughter who can't decide which is better. The title story deals with an aging woman who invents family connections in order to find places to stay; another presents a tall woman who only learns to be comfortable in her own skin after marrying a tattoo artist and becoming his canvas; the one I found I'd remembered most strongly was about a girl whose family moved across the country to a poor neighborhood in Massachusetts, where she makes friends with a "bad girl" she can neither understand nor save. The stories are unified by consistently dealing with at least one character who is somehow unusual, unconventional, or living outside of society's expectations, and McCracken attempts to portray the humanity and dignity of those characters without stripping them of their quirks or differences. Sometimes she gets too heavy-handed in these attempts, and sometimes it feels like she's trying too hard to come up with off-the-wall characters, but the writing is solid, and the stories that are "on" have a sort of haunting quality to them - the kind of quality that lets you forget the story but not the feeling of it, so when you come back to it years later, it's eerily familiar while still feeling new.
It's not an amazing book, but it's a good read, and definitely filled the bill for what I wanted this weekend - a book I could read a few pages at a time without having to pour too much attention into. I'll probably come back to it again in a year or two, after I've had enough time to forget all the separate plots again.
There are nine stories in total, and some of them are somewhat throwaway, but there are a few of them that really make the book worth reading. I think my favorite was "Mercedes Kane," about a mother who wishes she were a genius, a grown-up child prodigy trying desperately to be normal, and a daughter who can't decide which is better. The title story deals with an aging woman who invents family connections in order to find places to stay; another presents a tall woman who only learns to be comfortable in her own skin after marrying a tattoo artist and becoming his canvas; the one I found I'd remembered most strongly was about a girl whose family moved across the country to a poor neighborhood in Massachusetts, where she makes friends with a "bad girl" she can neither understand nor save. The stories are unified by consistently dealing with at least one character who is somehow unusual, unconventional, or living outside of society's expectations, and McCracken attempts to portray the humanity and dignity of those characters without stripping them of their quirks or differences. Sometimes she gets too heavy-handed in these attempts, and sometimes it feels like she's trying too hard to come up with off-the-wall characters, but the writing is solid, and the stories that are "on" have a sort of haunting quality to them - the kind of quality that lets you forget the story but not the feeling of it, so when you come back to it years later, it's eerily familiar while still feeling new.
It's not an amazing book, but it's a good read, and definitely filled the bill for what I wanted this weekend - a book I could read a few pages at a time without having to pour too much attention into. I'll probably come back to it again in a year or two, after I've had enough time to forget all the separate plots again.
maxgardner's review against another edition
4.0
This is such a solid collection of stories, and though there are definitely a few that particularly stand out, I enjoyed all of them. I appreciate that so many of them have an unusual element to them, oftentimes revealed subtly and with indifference—a woman who opens her body as a canvas for a tattoo artist, a former circus performer who decides to take into her family's home one of her old circus friends, a wayward older woman who works her way into distant family members' homes. But they all are grounded in reality and mundaneness and touch on universal truths, which give them a human element I felt I could connect with.
Here are some thoughts on the ones that stood out for me (will add more):
It's Bad Luck To Die
This is one of my favorites from the collection because it's humorous and also touches on a theme that I feel I can connect with pretty well—finding acceptance and love for a body that you feel uncomfortable in. Sometimes that means defining your own vision of beauty, even if it's forged from the beauty someone else recognizes in you and guides you to see.
Favorite quotes
Here are some thoughts on the ones that stood out for me (will add more):
It's Bad Luck To Die
This is one of my favorites from the collection because it's humorous and also touches on a theme that I feel I can connect with pretty well—finding acceptance and love for a body that you feel uncomfortable in. Sometimes that means defining your own vision of beauty, even if it's forged from the beauty someone else recognizes in you and guides you to see.
Favorite quotes
Like all good mothers, she always knew the worst was going to happen and was disappointed and relieved when it finally did.
All she wanted was for me to become miraculously blank.
My mother was wrong. I never felt like a freak because of my height: I felt like a ghost haunting too much space... It's like when you move into a new place, and despite the lease and despite the rent you've paid, the place doesn't feel like home and you're not sure you want to stay... Well, getting a tattoo—it's like hanging drapes, or laying carpet, or driving that first nail into the fresh plaster: it's deciding you've moved in.
...I am not a museum, not yet, I'm a love letter, a love letter.