Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McCracken repeatedly creates characters who crave emotional shelter in this debut collection of nine stories. At times her oddball individuals seem contrived, as in the listless ``Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware,'' narrated by a motherless girl whose father allows an ever-shifting cast of eccentrics to take up residence in his spacious, run-down home. Similarly, ``What We Know About the Lost Aztec Children'' features an armless woman--a former sideshow attraction--who welcomes a lonely friend from the circus into her family's suburban home. Sometimes though, such conscious attempts to blend perversity and sentimentality pay off: In ``It's Bad Luck to Die,'' a woman marries a tattooist three decades her senior and shows her love by becoming a canvas for his most extravagant work. Another highlight is the wistful title tale, whose nomadic protagonist makes a life of being an uninvited, potentially unwanted guest by introducing herself to unwary families as their long-lost Aunt Helen Beck (hell and back?). Ultimately, Here's Your Hat is a melancholy book, filled with dispossessed, acquiescent characters incapable of forging permanent bonds with those who offer refuge. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
All the stories in this offbeat collection live up to the promise of their titles. ``It's Bad Luck To Die'' features a six-foot woman who comes to feel comfortable with herself only after she marries Tiny, a tattoo artist who uses her body as an immense empty canvas to be filled with his artistic creations. In ``The Bar of Our Recent Unhappiness,'' a middle-aged man lets his hair grow unfashionably long while he waits for his wife to emerge from a coma so she can cut it for him. In the title story, an older woman travels from relative to relative, having no home of her own, until one hospitable young couple learns the truth about her. Although McCracken has filled her stories with a cast of oddballs, she has created such compelling lives for them that she moves beyond our curiosity to gain our sympathy. These wonderful stories belong in most fiction collections.-- Barbara Love, St. Lawrence Coll., Kingston, Ontario (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
If the title of McCracken's first collection leads you to expect romantic comedy or even a light touch, forget it; this James A. Michener-award-winning author's characters are outcasts, and their lives are grim indeed. In nine stories--all but the title one narrated in the first person--McCracken investigates the lives of the freaks. ``It's Bad Luck to Die'' records the thoughts of a tall, blond, relatively young widow as she comes fully to appreciate that her now-deceased dwarflike elderly husband Tiny, a tattoo artist, has covered every inch of her body in decals, slogans, and copies of Masterpieces of the Renaissance. In ``Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware,'' a grown woman, a heavy drinker herself, remembers growing up in a house full of alcoholic men whom her father, a widower, collected like strays before he, too, disappeared into the nether reaches of the bottle, leaving the men to raise her. The 55-year-old male narrator of ``The Bar of Our Recent Unhappiness'' (``I am a man of many small mistakes. I am not competent'') quaffs beers with a young man whose mother is dying in the hospital room where the narrator's common-law wife vegetates after a car accident; in the end, the two men get drunk and speak incoherently of their grief. Other characters include a retarded midget, once a twin, who turns up at the door of an armless woman, an old acquaintance from their circus days; a 74-year-old convicted wife-killer, paroled now to a sleepy halfway house; a child prodigy who has grown into a disheveled woman riddled with self-doubt; and, in the title piece, an old woman who's made a career of visiting ``relatives'' she finds in phone books. Many of these stories taste of the writers' workshop--well-crafted but dispassionate and cheerless. An able apprentice Raymond Carver--interesting, but not to everyone's taste.
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