Review by Booklist Review
Award-winning short story writer McCafferty has a wonderful talent for evoking the vulnerability, instinct for truth, and loyalty inherent in children. The kids in her mesmerizing and melancholy tales cope with the void left by vanished fathers and the confusion wrought by unhinged mothers. McCafferty's world is painfully yet beautifully alive, breathing and glowing with a shifting aura of sadness and hope. These are stories of skewed domesticity; of young, rattled parents and their knowing offspring. In the title story, a girl remembers the wacky desperation of her father on their last night together; another daughter watches her mother crack up in a supermarket, filling their carts with bottles of syrup and boxes of All, in "World upon Her Shoulder." Moving to slightly older children, McCafferty explores the awful threshold of sexual awakening with particular aplomb and humor in "Help, I'm Being Kidnapped." The prevailing image of this moody, lyrical, and redeeming collection is the comforting interior of a late-model sedan. In story after story, these big ships cruise night highways, a love song on the radio, a parent seeking peace at the wheel, the parent's preternaturally understanding child by his or her side. ~--Donna Seaman
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Winner of the 1992 Drue Heinz Prize, McCafferty presents 11 powerful, melancholic stories whose theme is deterioration--of relationships and of the mind. Her weary characters usually feel abandoned, at least figuratively, by their families, but rather than effecting change or making decisions, they simply reflect on the cumulative experiences that led to their present ennui. In the disturbing title story (also included in Best American Short Stories 1991 ), a child witnesses the division of her family after her father returns, psychologically ruined, from a war. The particularly wrenching ``By the Light of Friendship'' shows a lonely man nervously awaiting his 14-year-old daughter at the bus station, only to be told she has decided not to visit him. In ``The Shadders Go Away,'' a mother taking her young sons on vacation feels overwhelmed by their unresponsiveness even as she acts jovial and hopeful. Reading McCafferty's collection, one feels empathy for characters trapped by circumstance and inertia; rather than disdain them, we share the poignancy of their experiences. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Common motifs link these 11 fine stories by McCafferty, winner of the 1992 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Most of the stories are told from the viewpoint of a little girl whose single mother is revealed to be eccentric and perhaps certifiably disconnected. Throughout, Pop 40 songs define each woman's apparent emotional range. Men aren't so much blamed as portrayed as ill formed and ineffectual. Thus, in the title story, Zenia's father returns from an unnamed war with a ring of 52 keys and a cry in his voice. In ``Thirst,'' Doris likens her daughter to something ``they had picked up one day like groceries.'' ``While Mother Was Gone with 571'' (the digits being the license tag of her newest beau), the narrator and a friend conspire to hail a series of taxis to reach the home of a reclusive, hysterical neighbor. In the best story, ``An Evocation,'' the death of a childhood friend stirs memories of the Fifties that are alternately funny, bittersweet, and ugly. Recommended for most collections.-- Ron Antonucci, Hudson Lib. & Historical Soc . , Ohio (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
Tender, richly textured stories of children and adults working against their feelings of loss, abandonment, and personal dissolution--in a first collection from this year's winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. A young girl watches her mother blame ``her great speed and recklessness on the car....`Come on, Aqua Nova...We gotta slow down!' '' and fill a grocery cart with syrup (``she adored it, she worshiped it, some overblown verb like that''); the child already knows this will lead to the Delaware State Hospital and is ``heavy with a gut-level knowledge that everyone and her mother in this world was doomed.'' There's lots of doom here, along with efforts to connect: A young widow briefly fills the void with a foreign- looking man and someone else's child; a man, hoping to see his daughter for the first time in three years, falls into a casual friendship at the bus stop; a beleaguered woman, on an excruciating family outing, is drawn to strangers; a dumped wife hopes for a happy vacation in Florida with her sons, but her 12-year-old suddenly drops his usual recitation of nature facts for a frightening outburst. McCafferty looks at morally ambiguous moments in adolescence: a prank played on a neighbor; cruelty to a girl who looks gorgeous only from behind. Much reminiscent memoir-ish writing, plus a couple of stories less conventional in style: an incest survivor's psychic confusion and cold disconnection from husband and adopted child; the jumpy interior monologue of a girl whose father has returned home, deeply disturbed, from war. Fine writing in an often touching debut.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
