We Want What We Want
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Thirteen glittering, surprising, and darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives, from two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Alix Ohlin.
In the mordantly funny “Money, Geography, Youth,” Vanessa arrives home from a gap year volunteering in Ghana to find that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Unable to reconcile the girl she went to dances with in the eighth grade and the woman in her father’s bed, Vanessa turns to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion. In the subversive “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” Amanda drives to upstate New York to rescue her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men living in a beautiful home, discussing the classics and drinking cocktails, moving her to wonder what freedoms she might be willing to trade for a life of such elegant comfort. And in “The Universal Particular,” Tamar welcomes her husband’s young stepcousin into her home, only to find her cool suburban life knocked askew in ways she cannot quite understand.
Populated with imperfect families, burned potential, and inescapable old flames, the stories in We Want What We Want are, each one, diamond-sharp — sparkling with pain, humour, and beauty.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Life is full of decisions, and sometimes the wrong ones are just too tempting to resist. In these 13 short stories, Alix Ohlin—author of wonderful novels like Dual Citizens—shows off her razor-sharp and wickedly dark sense of humour. In “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” a woman attempts to rescue her cousin from a materialistic religious cult, only to be seduced into joining herself. In “The Point of No Return,” a vaguely sexual friendship between two women gets even more emotionally complicated years later when one of them gets engaged to the other’s father. Each of Ohlin’s richly detailed stories sparkles with vividly descriptive language, subtle observations about human nature, and clever plot twists. The more mistakes her lovable characters make, the more we identify with them.
