Review by Booklist Review
Among the more appealing things about this first collection of stories is its assured exploration of voice. These mostly first-person narrators show flashes of humor and vigor, as with the young narrator of "Bonanza," who explains that "part of the joy of whistling was knowing it was always available, you carried the equipment right on your face." But here and elsewhere the narrator's emerging declarativeness confronts uncertainties and loss, especially in the form of death. And, interestingly, it is the interpolation of the dying or dead one's voice in the narrative that provides a means for managing loss. At the end of "Waiting," the mourning narrator's disorientation at the wake with the figure of her mother's dead hands and the silence of the mourners "gives way . . . to the empty air that says You girls, you girls." And in "The Fourth State of Matter," the narrator embroiled in "the dying game" with her suffering collie gets relief from the enveloping silence after her colleague's brutal murder, with the remembered sound of his voice, "Exactly." --Jim O'Laughlin
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Moments of profundity abut glimpses of life at its most mundane in this vividly realized collage of episodes from the author's life. The 12 personal narratives collected here, five of which are reprinted from magazines, unfold more thematically than chronologically. "Cousins," for example, explores kinship and female bonding, while the title piece confronts the difficulties and pleasures of women's relationships with men. This scheme allows freelance writer Beard to juxtapose childhood episodes with scenes from her adult life in a manner that illustrates how our past experiences continually inform our interpretations of similar situations later in life. An ongoing concern of this collection is the way people establish connections and how these connections are broken through divorce, death and other forms of separation; themes like the endurance of friendship and kinship are also explored. Beard's self-scrutiny is painstaking and free of self-absorption, and her keen eye for details grounds each episode in its historical moment. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
These 12 autobiographical sketches are linked by the theme of romance and the au-thor's painful disillusionment with it. One story, "The Fourth State of Matter," selected for The New Yorker's 1996 fiction issue (June 24/July 1), tells how the author happened to escape a co-worker's fatal shooting spree. With a remarkable eye for detail and the past, Beard writes of her earliest memory, a childhood attachment to a doll named Hal, Barbie dolls that didn't know what to do with Ken, eluding a would-be attacker on the highway, and her divorce from a husband who preferred to look at himself in the mirror than at her. Her conversational style puts the reader, for example, right on the handlebars of her sister's bicycle: "No. Yes. Around the corner, clipping a parked car. Sewer grate. Here comes the sewer grate. Hard to describe how skinny my legs are, except to say that one of them fit perfectly down the sewer grate." Beard's work has also appeared in Story and other publications. The current title will be of interest to public and academic libraries.Nancy Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, N.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
These one-dimensional autobiographical fragments of girlhood, young adulthood, and a crumbling marriage are exercises in mere recollection, mostly lacking the reflection or the narrative drive to make them worthwhile. There are many reasons a writer's life stories can be interesting to other people. After reading Beard's, it's not easy to remember what they are. Excepting occasional jarring particles of portentousness (""Here is a scene,"" Beard instructs in ""Cousins"") and lapses into a voice embarrassingly reminiscent of a corny newspaper humor column, Beard's recollections usually hit just one note. It's one of childlike wonder, whether the stories take place in her childhood or not. A group of elements recur with an all-too-comforting familiarity--a favorite song played on a car tape deck (or on a Walkman or at a concert), an imaginary friend, a beloved dog, the moon. All are rendered with a generic lyricism consisting largely of the rampant manufacture of similes. Self-doubt and inner conflict don't much figure. External conflict, most notably a marriage that comes to an end, comes across largely as an intrusion into this otherwise unperturbed field of view. Fortunately, in one piece, and in parts of a couple of others, Beard's meandering recall runs into events that transcend the confines of her practiced style. ""Waiting"" juxtaposes two narratives of her mother's death: the December days when she and her sister took turns attending at the hospital and, with what remaining time they had, shopping for funeral arrangements. And in ""The Family Hour,"" Beard uses a lighter touch to give an original account of a familiar situation in memoirs--a childhood with a father who drinks. Were more of her memoirs to display the focus glimpsed in those pieces, they would be the makings of an impressive first book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
