Oh, this book. I have hearts in my eyes over this book. It’s so odd that 2/3 of my CBR8 books so far are anthologies, but here we go. If you have any affection at all for anthologies, this one is like sliding into a warm bubble bath with a glass of dry red wine. I’ll get to summaries of each story shortly, but first, can we talk about Schappell’s treatment of her female characters? It’s implicit in the title that this might be a somehow female-centric book, but that could go so many ways. Some ways that it did not go: dwelling on one stage of a woman’s life (there’s maybe an emphasis on college-aged women, but it’s balanced), Madonna/whore issues, a parade of rah-rah girl power feel good stories. Every story focuses on women, human women. Powerful, ambivalent, damaged, pot smoking, wise, hurt, hurtful, growing, grating, ugly, real women. It’s beautiful.
The stories are interconnected in ways I’d probably have to reread the book to fully catch, and it makes the whole thing feel like one big easter egg. I never realized that was important to me in a short story collection but after this one I can definitely say I love that and prefer it.
In “A Dog Story,” Kate and Douglas rescue a dog while they’re struggling to start a family. Douglas is a city planner working on gentrifying a neighborhood, and he spends some time working on one particular playground…
…which Charlotte and Paige are at with their kids in “Elephant,” cautiously becoming friends and opening up about their mixed feelings about motherhood. (Even their two sets of mixed feelings are not quite the same.) Paige learns more about her new friend when she opens up about an incident in college…
…which she’s trying to process in “Are You Comfortable?” She finds an unlikely confidante in her grandfather, who is developing dementia. But she’s not the only one struggling with the incident, because…
…in “Out of the Blue and Into the Black,” Charlotte’s college friend Bender is being swept along in the destructive current of her own life and popping her head up from it just often enough to think to reach out to Charlotte and then be swept under again.
In “Monsters of the Deep,” a teenage girl whose sex life is neither healthy nor necessarily victimizing, is not what her reputation suggests. Twenty years later…
…in “I’m Only Going To Tell You This Once,” she’s seeing horrible parallels between her own past and her teenage son’s new relationship. She has a particular scar from her past, and the only person who’s ever understood it is her old coworker Emily, an anorexic who…
…is learning how to cook a chicken with her mother’s over the phone coaching in “The Joy of Cooking,” and is delightfully unlikable. She demands so much more of her mother’s energy than her also-adult sister, Paige, who you might recall from “Elephant.”
In “Aren’t You Dead Yet?” Lizzie is entangled with a charismatic and reckless artist and then spends years trying to find closure after the relationship ends. I actually can’t remember how or if this one tied in to any others.
The only story that I didn’t love was “Out of the Blue and Into the Black,” I can’t choose a favorite between “I’m Only Going To Tell You This Once” and “The Joy of Cooking.” If you enjoy short stories or books about human women, I highly recommend this one.