Beasts & Children
Stories
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Linked stories exploring the dark heart of the American family: "Electrifying, daring . . . sure to appeal to fans of Karen Russell and Lorrie Moore " (Booklist, starred review).
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
The Bowmans are declining Texas gentry, heirs to an airline fortune, surrounded by a patriarch's stuffed trophies and lost dreams. They will each be haunted by the past as they strive to escape its force.
The Fosters are diplomats' kids who might as well be orphans. Jill and Maizie grow up privileged amid poverty, powerless to change the lives of those around them and uncertain whether they have the ability to change their own.
The Guzmans have moved between Colombia and the United States, each generation seeking opportunity for the next, only to find that the American dream can be as crushing as it is elusive.
From the tense territory of a sagging, grand porch in Texas to a gated community in Thailand to a lonely apartment in nondescript suburbia, these wry, dark stories unwind the lives of three families as they navigate the ever-shifting landscapes of the American middle class.
"No one is safe, Parker reminds us, especially within the family circle—but one's chosen family can also offer salvation. . . . The stories, like the mounted heads in the Bowmans' trophy room, rivet the gaze, demand that readers recognize themselves in those glassy eyes—and then become disconcertingly alive." —The New York Times Book Review
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The monkeys, seals, elephants, pangolins, sunfish, and domestic pets of Parker's wonderful collection of linked stories offer sublime metaphors and splendid foils for the floundering adults, as prone to moments of astonishing cruelty as the beasts are to sudden vengeance. Characters include sisters Carline and Cissy Bowman, whose family spends a fortune to ransom the father out of Thailand in "The White Elephant"; another pair of sisters, Jill and Maizie, are daughters of diplomats stationed in Ching Mai, and who venture out of their compound in "Rainy Season." Other stories involve a road trip to catch a lover ("The Balcony"); Jill and Maizie visiting a Thai orphanage ("Endangered Creatures"), and Carline and Cissy dealing with memories of their mother's bout with cancer ("Catastrophic Molt"). More than the dissatisfied and guilty adults, Parker's sympathies lie with the children, who with preternatural calm and piercing devotion survive early formative ruptures that will haunt them. Parker's sentences are clear, polished, finely-faceted gems, the images incandescent and precise, the tone balanced between the hypnotic and the absurd. Drawing out the implacable connections between beauty and danger, between love and pain, each individual story delivers a final punch of surprise both unpremeditated and yet perfect, "whole and alive in the way that only children and animals seem to be." It's to Parker's credit that the collection feels as complete as a novel, a journey transporting readers from the exotic to the familiar, leaving them blinking, dry-mouthed, and changed.
