Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Although Diski is renowned across the pond, her defiant treatise against her terminal cancer, In Gratitude, published just before her 2016 death is, ironically, what earned her substantial stateside acclaim. Now available posthumously to U.S. readers is her spectacular 1995 collection of bizarre-to-rueful-to-stunning stories, bookended by two princesses living (and reading) in towers: the titular vanishing princess, who learns about food, time, and mirrors; and the Old Princess, whose long life is spent waiting. Another royal becomes Queen-meaning Mrs. King, as Diski alchemizes Rumpelstiltskin's tale into Shit and Gold, a wicked feminist reclamation. A single story, Strictempo, gets plainly autobiographical as it portrays a 15-year-old expelled from boarding school and returned to negligent parents. A writer has an afternoon tryst with a stranger after discussing the leaper who's disrupted rush-hour subway traffic. A woman manifests her lifelong goal of the perfect, all-day bath. A housewife enjoys a filthy affair, even as life went on as normal. A toddler's mother goes on a Caribbean vacation only to realize her husband is a dull disappointment. A teenager's mother matter-of-factly talks blow jobs and doing drugs with her 13-year-old. Memorable girls and women damaged, truculent, curious, stalwart occupy Diski's pages, claiming space, agency, and well-deserved attention.--Hong, Terry Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The dozen stories of this excellent posthumous collection look at isolation, anxiety, sex, the roles women play, and the attempts of men to define those roles, all from a female perspective. Three stories feature fairy tale heroines: two princesses confined to towers, one miller's daughter tasked with spinning straw into gold. The title story's vanishing princess never asks about the world outside her tower. As the narrator explains, no one told the princess curiosity was a quality worth cultivating. A passing soldier brings food, and then another soldier brings a mirror. Etching the princess's likeness onto the mirror, the soldiers create what Diski (1947-2016) calls the earliest example of cubist art. In "Leaper," two women meet after another woman throws herself under a train. The budding relationship ends when one of the two women, a writer suffering doubts about her own writing skill, has reservations about her newfound friend. Some stories depict growing up in a disjointed, unloving family. In "My Brother Stanley," a girl knows her dead half-brother only from photographs and a portrait. "Strictempo" shows a teenager expelled from school, abandoned by her parents, living in a mental health facility where dancing offers respite from thinking. Diski's protagonists include ordinary women with unusual interior lives. In "Housewife," Susan Donohoe indulges in wild sex fantasies during her affair with an English lecturer. One protagonist imagines the perfect bath; another obsesses over whether Mount Rushmore exists. Diski displays hard-edged humor, incisive perceptions, and a lively imagination. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Feminist writing lost a provocative, stylistic voice with the death of Diski (Nothing Natural) last year. She wrote not only several novels and varied works of nonfiction and memoir but also a regular column for the London Review of Books. This is her only collection of short fiction, originally published in Great Britain in 1995. The varied stories include some fairy tales in which the heroine remains passively trapped or consciously bucks the genre trope. Other pieces are less allegorical. A rebellious teenage girl is deposited in a mental institution during the swinging 1960s. An unadventurous housewife discovers her contempt for her husband while on a Caribbean vacation. Another figure achieves her life goal: the perfect, uninterrupted bath. A mom rationally introduces her teenage daughter to a discussion of drugs and sex. In the most memorable work, a competent hausfrau in the midst of a kinky affair with a college professor thoughtfully analyzes the ethics of betraying both her husband and her lover's wife. VERDICT Each story is told in Diski's clear, authoritative voice and explores how women strain (or not) against the bounds of a confining world. A great introduction to Diski's works. [See Prepub Alert, 6/26/17.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2017. 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.
