Scan barcode
A review by jessrock
Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry by Elizabeth McCracken
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.