Review by New York Times Review
The only time NPR has ever made legal parking me swerve space into and an weep illegal parking space and weep Was when, on "Writer's Almanac," Garrison Keillor recited Addonizio's poem "Eating Together," about lunch with a friend: "She eats / as though starving ... / and what's killing her/eats, too." No surprise, then, that the champ of this lovely story collection is "Cancer Poems," in which a late-middle-aged, middle-middle-class woman in Stage 4 takes a poetry class at a community center. The comic misery of the workshop lets Addonizio get away with a story about the importance poetry assumes in the shadow of death; the perfect ending alternates banal conversation with fragments of Keats. Addonizio can make her points too bluntly; in "Beautiful Lady of the Snow," a child forced to perform sexual dances for her grandfather imagines snow "making everything it touches white, and pure again." She's most frightening when she leaves the meaning of a story wide open. In the last paragraph of "Blown," a hung-over young woman who has just fellated a stranger thinks, "He has big beautiful teeth, perfectly even and white, like tablets you could write your autobiography on, if you could write small enough, and just like that, the next seven months of your life go down the drain." "She eats / as though starving ... / and what's killing her/eats, too." No surprise, then, that the champ of this lovely story collection is "Cancer Poems," in which a late-middle-aged, middle-middle-class woman in Stage 4 takes a poetry class at a community center. The comic misery of the workshop lets Addonizio get away with a story about the importance poetry assumes in the shadow of death; the perfect ending alternates banal conversation with fragments of Keats. Addonizio can make her points too bluntly; in "Beautiful Lady of the Snow," a child forced to perform sexual dances for her grandfather imagines snow "making everything it touches white, and pure again." She's most frightening when she leaves the meaning of a story wide open. In the last paragraph of "Blown," a hung-over young woman who has just fellated a stranger thinks, "He has big beautiful teeth, perfectly even and white, like tablets you could write your autobiography on, if you could write small enough, and just like that, the next seven months of your life go down the drain."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 9, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
"Once there was a hag who was really a princess, who lived in a storage unit that was really a castle." In Addonizio's (In the Box Called Pleasure) second collection of short stories, she explores the various ways people interpret the world in order to find peace. In "Beautiful Lady of the Snow," a little girl punishes and subsequently kills her pets in order to find solace from the stress of living with her depressed mother in a motel. "Night Owls" follows a frustrated teenage vampire who loves a boy but also wants to suck his blood. The title story traces the decline of a young man who trades in his promising future for a love affair with an alcoholic carnie. "Ever After" is a pseudo-fairy tale about dwarves living in an apartment and waiting for a woman to redeem them from their terrible lives with an apple. Though Addonizio's characters find themselves in unusual predicaments, she nonetheless convincingly renders their psyches. The stories are weighty but unassuming, and readers can identify with the characters whether they're vampires, carnies, or pet killers. This book is for those who enjoy sardonic humor, forceful narration, and a variety of genres. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The short stories here are so tight and polished that it's hard to believe that this is only Addonizio's second collection; she is mainly known as a poet (Tell Me was a National Book Award finalist). The characters, from the woman with terminal cancer who takes a poetry workshop to the second grader who hates dancing on her grandpa's lap to the college student who happens to be half vampire, all exhibit "true grit." The stories are all strikingly honest depictions of characters trying their best at something, even if that something is not particularly good for them. The latter is true in the case of the title story, in which a man looks back on his youth working as a magician in a traveling carnival and lusting after the carnival owner's wife. There are also shorter pieces that give us more of a keyhole glimpse into a situation or character, such as "The Other Woman," "Blown," and new takes on classic fairy tales, such as "The Hag's Journey." VERDICT A highly enjoyable collection with something for everyone; recommended for readers of Lydia Davis or fans of modern fairy tales.-Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA (c) Copyright 2014. 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
Poet Addonizio brings her hip, dark sensibility to a second collection of short fiction.In the first story, a second-grade girl kills her goldfish and pet bird in reaction to being sexually exploited by her obese grandfather.In the second, two sleazy young women get drunk and rip off the guy in whose hotel room they've spent the night. In the third, a girl takes time during a meditation class to reflect on her dead sister. Abusive relationships, breakups and terminal illness fill out the other 10 stories, but in the most appealing of them, Addonizio (Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, 2009, etc.) doses her basic mix of hopelessness and alienation with cleverness and whimsy. A story about a girl who's half vampire has several laughs, the title story has fun with its circus setting, and two of the others, "The Hag's Journey" and "Ever After," reinvent fairy-tale tropes in ways that would be delightful if they didn't end so badly. In the latter, the Seven Dwarfs are a ragtag bunch of fellows living in a fifth-floor walk-up: a junkie named Dopey, a teen runaway named Sneezy, a recovering alcoholic named Doc, etc., most employed as faux munchkins at a restaurant called Oz. They're awaiting the fulfillment of a prophecy they read about in a book found in a Dumpster, one involving a beautiful girl and an apple. Unsurprisingly, things go south. "[M]y name isn't Grumpy," said Grumpy. "It's Carlos....I'm sick of all of you with your fake names and voodoo loser fantasies about some chick who ain't coming. She ain't coming, man. Get it through your fat heads."The worldview of this book is so bleak it might need a warning label. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
