The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa
Stories
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
With the stories in her first collection, Elizabeth Stuckey-French establishes herself as a smart new voice in American fiction and stakes her claim to a territory somewhere on the edge of stability, where normal is not just boring but nearly impossible, and where standing out in a crowd may just cause isolation.
Her characters, mostly Midwesterners, are bizarre but endearing. A reform school graduate is placed in the care of her psychic aunt and in the servitude of a lucrative dog retrieval scheme. A mother who has accepted her son’s modest employment selling blue jeans bemoans the above-board lifestyle she discovers him leading as a wanted criminal. A rehab counselor lives vicariously through her already pregnant stepdaughter’s love affair with a drunk who spends his days in recovery and his nights in the bar.
Full of wry wit, tender sympathy, and heartland attitude, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa is as strange, funny, and poignant as the real world it resembles.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Matter-of-fact surprise animates this debut collection of 12 singular stories by Stuckey-French, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and a James Michener/Paul Engle Fellowship winner. Set in a slightly skewed Midwest, each of the tales features at least one eccentric character whose personality seems to invite participation in peculiar experiences. In the title story, the mother of two youngsters, driving through a blizzard in pursuit of her husband, picks up a gas station worker on impulse, paying him to keep her and the children company. "Junior" features a psychic who makes her living finding lost pets and enlists her niece, a juvenile delinquent, in one of her shady schemes. A sojourn in New Mexico teaches the niece something about her own motivations, but her remorse for her small crimes is not of the garden variety. A common thread runs through this melange of encapsulated life stories, some weird, some moving, some funny: most people will do or say anything to improve a discomfiting situation- even lie to each other or to themselves. The English professor and his wife in "Famous Poets" prefer not to notice the rudeness of a visiting poet rather than acknowledge the truth exposed by their own young daughter. Odd avocations are presented as run-of-the-mill: in "Search and Rescue," a ladylike office worker reveals that she's a scuba-diver who gladly volunteers her services to locate dead bodies in polluted rivers. Talk hosts like Jenny Jones or Jerry Springer have accustomed Americans to attention-demanding characters and bizarre incidents, so that fiction writers struggle to compete in the realm of the fantastic. Stuckey-French bests those spectacles of the everyday absurd, and does to with style and verve.
