Review by Booklist Review
In her first book since the publication of her collected stories in 2006, Hempel reaffirms her diamond reputation as a writer of gorgeously distilled, archly witty, and daringly empathetic tales. Hempel's forte is the inner monologue, which, in these 15 incisive stories, ranges in form from brief but reverberating prose poems to sustained tales saturated with evocative detail and evolving emotions. Cutting vignettes track cynical affairs and defeated marriages. Age and death are approached with compassion and ire. A volunteer at a cash-strapped Spanish Harlem animal shelter recounts her impassioned efforts to comfort and protect the dogs she profoundly loves. In Cloudland, the longest, most ravishing story, a former New York high-school teacher, forever yearning for the secret baby she gave up for adoption, starts a new life as a home health aide in climate-change-challenged Florida, then faces shattering revelations about the maternity home she sheltered in years ago. Hempel is a master miniaturist, capturing in exquisitely nuanced sentences the sensuous, cerebral, and spiritual cascade of existence, homing in on pain and humor and the wisdom each can engender.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Short story virtuoso Hempel's first collection since 2006 consists of 15 characteristically bold, disconcerting, knockout stories. The title story, which fits on a single page, offers no plot, names, dates, or setting-just snippets of dialogue, a proverb, and a gesture to capture a moment of personal connection. "The Quiet Car," in two pages, shows a moment of disconnection signaling the end of a relationship. A volunteer who relates better to dogs than people narrates "A Full-Service Animal Shelter," an 11-page rant/lament about working with dogs on the "euth" list. In "Chicane," a woman longs for closure when she meets the French actor who once seduced her suicidal aunt. In "Greed," a woman seeks payback as she tracks the older woman with whom her husband is having an affair. The volume ends with the remarkable 62-page "Cloudland," a visually rich, heart-wrenching portrait of a Florida caregiver haunted by thoughts of the baby girl she gave up for adoption at a Maine maternity home years ago. In stories that can be funny, brutal, poetic, blunt, elusive, or all of the above, this accomplished collection highlights Hempel's signature style with its condensed prose, quirky narrators, and touching, disturbing, transcendent moments. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The first collection in more than a decade from Hempel offers a dizzying array of short fiction held together by the unmistakable textures of her voice.Hempel is often called a minimalist, and that aesthetic is very much in evidence here. Of the 15 stories, 10 are two pages or shorter in length, but if you think this means they're slight, you'll want to think again. Rather, Hempel packs a lot into her narrow spaces: nuance, longing, love, and loss. "At the end, he said, No metaphors!" she writes in the title story. "Soat the end, I made my hands a hammock for him. My arms the trees." The effect is to articulate an idea and then to illustrate it simultaneously. "That reminds me of when I knew a romance was over," she opens "The Quiet Car," reminding us that all stories begin in the middle, with the characters' lives already underway. And yet, for all the succinct deftness of these shorter pieces, it is in the collection's longer entries that Hempel's vision takes full shape. The remarkable "A Full-Service Shelter," inspired by her longtime animal advocacy, uses a repeating structureeach paragraph begins with a variation of the phrase "They knew us as the ones"to draw us into the futility and necessity of caring for dogs who have been abandoned, a tension that animates the narrative. "Greed" traces a wife's simmering vengeance against the older woman who is sleeping with her husband; the interloper is appropriately named "Mrs. Greed." Then, there's Cloudland, a novella that fills much of the second half of the book, the saga of a disgraced private school teacher doing home-care work in Florida who gave up for adoption the child she bore at 18. Constructed as a collection of fragments, the narrative circles itself, moving back and forth in time and often leaving the most important details unshared. The brilliance of the writing, however, resides in the way Hempel manages to tell us everything in spite of her narrator's reticence, teaching us to read between the lines. "I remember thinking," she writes: "There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong."Hempel's great gift is that her indirection only leads us further inward, toward the place where her characters must finally reckon with themselves. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
