#859 Runs Girl- Chinelo Okparanta

#859 Runs Girl- Chinelo Okparanta

Ada is a young Nigerian woman whose mother is having serious health problems. Because of money, they don’t go to the hospital soon enough, so her mother suffers. Because of money, they don’t get the care they need that could save her mother’s life. Because of money, Ada will turn to a night of prostitution to try to raise enough money to save her mother’s life. Because of money, Ada’s mother will die soon after hearing of her daughters sacrifice. Because of money, Ada, already ashamed of herself, will think her mother died disappointed in her as well.

Notable Passage: “And so there were silences, as if we no longer valued spoken words, as if spoken words were gaudy finishes on a delicate piece of art, unnecessary distractions from the masterpiece, whose substance was more meaningfully experienced if left unornamented.”

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#677 Keeping Watch Over the Sheep- Jon McGregor

#677 Keeping Watch Over the Sheep- Jon McGregor

A man is being denied entrance to the annual school Christmas nativity production, apparently there is no room at the inn. He has been banned from he school and has a restraining order put against him by his wife. All he wants to do is watch his daughter on stage for the first time. But his violent behavior has caught up with him.

“That’s what he was now, a situation.”

He leaves and tries to watch through the windows from outside, but he is arrested, he doesn’t understand why his daughter is crying. It is a very sad story.

Rating: 7-7-7-7 Total= 28

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

#462 The First Day- Edward P. Jones

This is a touching first day of school story. A mother takes her daughter to kindergarten for the first time. She takes her to the wrong school though. She wanted her daughter to go to the older school that is across from her church. That’s the school she knows about and that’s where she has thoughts of her daughter learning all the things she hasn’t.

When they arrive at the correct school we see that the mother herself can’t read. This is why her daughter’s education is so important. Her mother is proud but a little out of her element. We see new vs. old as a symbol here, the new school, her new shoes, etc. When her mother leaves her in the hands of her new teacher, we see her old socks have been torn, and the sound of her fleeting footsteps echo like the sound of time marching on.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#441 The Girl Who Raised Pigeons- Edward P. Jones

#441 The Girl Who Raised Pigeons- Edward P. Jones

It’s the late 1950’s and on Myrtle ave. in Washington D.C. the neighborhood is falling apart. In a few years, it will be razed and taken over by the city. Besty Ann is a little girl being raised by her father. Her mother died of cancer late in her pregnancy and they were able to save her.

She is a survivor, but she is lonely. She is frightened by a neighboring barber who raises pigeons. The pigeons scare her the first time, but intrigue her enough that she wants to raise some herself. She is insistent, so her father builds a coup and for three years, Betsy raised her pigeons. Every morning before dawn, her father visits the pigeons and makes sure they alive. He wants to protect her from seeing one of her pigeons dead.

Of course there is only so long he can protect her; there is only so long they can stay there before the neighborhood is lost; and there is only so long she can keep the pigeons.

Rating: 8-8-7-7 Total= 30

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

#415 Lusus Naturae- Margaret Atwood

This is a much different story than the first few in the collection. The narrator is going through a change, a Kafka-esque metamorphosis, turning slowly into a werewolf. They call it a disease, but they also think of it as a curse. The town is steps away from pitch-forks and torches, so the family stages her death, for their own sake, especially to protect their other daughter.

Now she lives hidden, but with anonymity comes a little more freedom to roam about at night. A funny moment is when she comes stumbles across a couple having sex in the woods, she thinks they are of her kind because they have fits and scream like she does. But when she approaches to give them a friendly kiss, all she knows how to do it bite.

Like the Kafka tale this is a worthy homage to, it’s about alienation, and being isolated and ostracized because of ones differences; being made to feel like a burden and the cause of other’s feeling of resentment.

“However she tried to hide it, she resented me, of course. There’s only so long you can feel sorry for a person before you come to feel that their affliction is an act of malice committed by them against you.”

Lusus Naturae is Latin meaning: freak of nature.

Rating: 9-8-9-8 Total= 34

#361 Red Sultan’s Big Boy- Chuck Palahniuk

#361 Red Sultan’s Big Boy- Chuck Palahniuk

Randall was divorced and lived on his family’s land. He was divorced and had a thirteen year-old daughter he would do anything to make happy. What made her happy, were horses. Her last horse suddenly died, so Lisa and her father bought a new horse she had seen on the internet called Red Sultan’s Big Boy.

Randall didn’t see the horse on this internet, he would prefer if the Internet didn’t exist, at least for his young daughter, he desperately was trying to keep from growing up.

“…lousy Internet access wasn’t tragic, not when a single keystroke could bring all the filth and degradation of the world into a person’s peaceful, bright kitchen. These days it took real effort to keep purity in a child’s life.”

The horse bought, Lisa happy, Randall was barraged by phone calls from neighbors. They warned him that the new horse was not allowed on their property and as long as it was on his, no neighbor would be coming to visit. They called the seemingly docile horse a murderer. Confused by this turn of events, he learned that there was a viral video of Red Sultan making the rounds. After getting several calls for unheard of offers for the horse, he decided to watch this video for himself. Bad idea…some things cannot be unseen.

It was “…like watching Mother Nature get revenge for all the global warming the white patriarchy had inflicted on the environment.”

And like the subtitle of this collection of stories states, this is a story you can’t unread. I’m not saying you shouldn’t read this, I’m just saying…you know…not every story about a horse it like the Black Stallion.

Rating: 9-8-9-7 Total= 33

#343 The Guesthouse- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#343 The Guesthouse- Kirsten Valdez Quade

Jeff has traveled 2,000 miles to take care of his grandmother’s funeral. “Jeff is awash in enervating, aching nostalgia, his limbs thick with it.”

His mother is traveling and doesn’t want to ruin her trip coming back for a funeral, so as usual the family duties fall to him. That’s as it has always been in this family:

“Jeff and his Grandmother were the doers, the fix, and now Jeff is alone. The fact is, he doesn’t know if he’ll survive the loss of her.”

His drug-reformed sister, the one living closest to the grandmother seems untouched by the death, but wants Jeff not keep the house. As it turns out their dead-beat father has been living in the guesthouse for a while secretly from Jeff, his sister, and their mother. He has convinced the grandmother that he is worthy of a second chance, and now he’s on his way to convincing the rest of the family, all except for Jeff. Eventually all snakes get vulnerable after feeding too much.

You know the writing is good when you start feeling the anger of the narrator, and feel some satisfaction when Jeff finally lashes out.

Rating: 9-8-8-8 Total= 33

#322 Night at the Fiestas- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#322 Night at the Fiestas- Kirsten Valdez Quade

Frances is sixteen, coming of age and like most teenagers, she is ashamed of her parents. She rides the bus, the one her father drives, on her way to the Fiestas U.nil she gets there, she is still just her father’s daughter.

“Frances had found herself looking away from his sad, obsequious displays of friendliness, embarrassed.”

Frances is smart, but shy. She wishes she could be like her cousin, open, flirtatious and free. She wishes she could be like Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

“If Frances’s life was to be a novel—as Frances fully intended—then finally, finally, something might happen at the Fiestas that could constitute the first page.”

She has an exciting but dangerous interaction with a painter on the bus. She is uneasy about him and the package he accidently left behind. As her and her cousin dance and drink at the Fiesta, Frances is uneasy and can’t seem to fit in.

“She danced and laughed, but her rhythm was off, her voice false and harsh. She gulped the beer until she felt the disembodies sensation of drunkenness, but the feeling only made her less a part of the crowd, untouchable and remote.”

Growing up is messy and complicated, and if you’re not careful you could sell off your own innocence before you even know what’s happening.

Rating: 8-8-9-9 Total= 34

#280 Mojave Rats- Kirsten Valdez Quade

#280 Mojave Rats- Kirsten Valdez Quade

In a trailer near the salt flats of the Mojave, Monica and her two daughters, Cordelia and Beatrice are freezing cold. The heater of their trailer has broke and Eliot, who can fix it, is gone until nightfall. They live in the trailer while Elliot gathers rock samples to finish his PhD in geology. Monica does not like living in a trailer park:

“Monica couldn’t help imagining sordid stories for them: mental illness, violent crime, shattering personal tragedy. The place caught people like trash in a wire fence, damaged, discarded people…Mojave rats…denizens of the dust.”

Despite knowing that they are educated people, with value and worth, she can’t help judging the rest of the park’s denizens harshly. “He could have been anything: a child molester, gambling addict, harmless kook. Why not a NASA engineer?”

“Monica wasn’t proud of her pretensions. But it was so easy to feel disdain for these people, so vital she not be mistaken for one of them.”

In the cold, Monica struggles with her past marriage and the daughter she had with her previous husband. She resents her presence, and then hates herself for feeling anything but love for Cordelia…then blames Cordelia for feeling guilty.

“Cordelia would forever feel on the outside, Monica saw, and Monica herself had put her there, because a person couldn’t live with that kind of reproach. It would only get harder between them…Cordelia’s judgments would become more pointed.”

Jeez, that’s a lot to put on a kid that’s been through a divorce and dragged out to live in the salt flats to live in a cold temporary trailer.

Rating: 7-6-7-7 Total= 27

#217 The Sugar-Tit- Carolyn Cooke

#217 The Sugar-Tit- Carolyn Cooke

Jack and Giddy lived in proper New England society. Right about there is usually where I start to lose interest in such stories. However, this one kept me interested. It wasn’t about the society as much as the strong and noble spirit of Giddy.

She had a healthy and rightful disdain for the men in her life: “Since she could remember, Giddy had washed out handkerchiefs full of stuff from men’s noses. First het father’s nose, then Jack’s”

“Most of the ailanthuses had been chopped down years ago because their blossoms stank and fouled the old cisterns on the roofs. But it turned out the flowers of the female had no scent; the rankness was in the males.”

As for Jack himself, “He was a wild inconsolable, enthusiast.” Always working on some outlandish business scheme like selling crayons to children in England. He wasn’t loveless and like everyone else, adored Giddy, but he was a philanderer and loved someone else. But in society life, you let such things go, unsaid. And so, she was a dutiful wife and he the tragic husband:

“He looked at her tragically, to remind her (she supposed) that he was a tragic man, a failure in business, and unfaithful;  none of his passions were perfectly requited.”

He had a Grecian heart, but he “Lived to suffer.” These qualities that her father believed made him undeserving of his daughter later made him like his son-in-law better than Giddy herself. She outlasts them all, however, stoic, loyal and hopeful.

Rating: 8-7-7-8 Total= 30