A chilling view of womanhood—made up of lies, secrets, and fear—expressed in elegant prose.
While the girls and women who inhabit Cohen’s 14 stories share tangential relationships, what most binds this collection together is a sense of overpowering dread.
“Naughty,” about a little girl named Amelia who's convinced her infant sister is a changeling, sets the horror-story tone for what follows. Nothing supernatural, or exactly murderous, happens, but the emotional menace swirling under the characters’ skins continually threatens to erupt—and sometimes does—into public chaos. So in “Bad Words,” second grader Yael reacts to her Orthodox Jewish parents’ impending divorce with a taboo dinner request, fully aware that “eating a cheeseburger is the same thing as killing someone.” By “A Girl of a Certain Age,” Yael has grown into a young woman fascinated by the murder of a co-worker by her seemingly normal fiance. In “Guns Are Safer for Children Than Laundry Detergent,” she creates an imaginary child with her boyfriend to avoid having a real baby. College student Sophie, who is Amelia’s former classmate and Yael’s future roommate, becomes the surrogate mother for a creepy professor and his wife in "Surrogate"; years later, in “Odd Goods,” she accuses another creepy academic of sexual harassment, exaggerating the details if not the truth. Meanwhile, Amelia reaches adolescence with a serious eating disorder. In “Expecting,” she’s described as “more virus than girl” by the teacher whose life spirals into lies after she and Amelia catch each other puking in the bathroom. Cohen’s girls and women are damaged but not evil. Addicted to small lies and thievery, Amelia’s sister, Karin, is also drawn to protecting others: a sometime classmate “allergic to the sun” in “Recess Brides”; a severely disabled child in “Old for Your Age, Tall for Your Height”; and skeletal Amelia in “Care.” Years later, in "Wife," Karin has an epiphany: “She wasn’t going to be a filthy whore. It was a terrible thing to realize, that she actually was what everyone took her for: wife, mother, schoolteacher.” Being ordinary is what scares these troubled women most.
A chilling view of womanhood—made up of lies, secrets, and fear—expressed in elegant prose.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63246-099-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Ig Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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