She: Fiction
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“Latiolais is as close to Alice Munro as a writer can get, but with a more modern edge.”—Los Angeles Times
A nameless fifteen-year-old runs away to Los Angeles, seeking life beyond the harsh constraints of her evangelical upbringing. She is the narrative of her passage, from her escape on a bus through her quiet, determined progress across the city’s unforgiving terrain. The journey takes her into and around the lives of Angelinos from all walks: a dancer whose hyperactive sense of smell makes her fiance’s presence insufferable; a penniless botanist who earns her keep creating sugar-icing flowers to decorate glamorous wedding cakes she can never afford; a dentist lamenting the abuses done to the teeth of a patient for whom he has cared dutifully. Her odd encounters, set against the backdrop of Los Angeles’s flagrant wealth, cast into relief its eccentricities and the everyday trials faced by its collection of lost souls. Together these stories reflect and refract one another, illuminating a poignant, unflinching portrait of loss and the search for identity in its wake.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It's 2013, and on the eve of her 15th birthday, a young, nameless girl runs away from her sheltered family home in Needles, Ca., to take refuge in Los Angeles. She is trying to escape her violent religious upbringing, and though she knows nobody when she arrives in LA, she soon encounters a series of interesting characters a gallery owner, an old man looking for company, and a homeless woman lugging a suitcase full of books, to name a few as she tries to find a place to sleep for the night. Author Latiolais (Widow) breaks up this main narrative by inserting a series of independent short stories, also revolving around other (mostly) nameless female protagonists. Despite their various conflicts, these women a ballerina sitting at her engagement party, a botanist turned cake decorator listening to a friend's marital suspicions, a niece waiting to hear news of her elderly aunt's cancer surgery share emotional discomfort with Latiolais's runaway, and the author finds ways to weave some of their smaller stories into the collection's main story. Overall, this is a volume in which characters stall their own forward propulsion with unending ruminations. Though some stories, like the sharp "Promotion," succeed, others feel lost in an overabundance of tangential prose.
