Review by New York Times Review
These stories of American ê housewives begin benignly enough: They grocery shop. They host co-op board soirees. They invite rule-breaking doormen to lunch and dismember them. They bid on estate sale jewelry that could be filled with teaspoons of cyanide. They dabble in taxidermy. Macabre does not even begin to describe this collection steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition. Flannery O'Connor would turn green with equal parts sick and envy. "Southern Lady Code" and "How to Be a Patron of the Arts" are conduct manuals parceling twisted bits of advice like "When a guest says your meatloaf looks like a football, don't tell the woman that her husband is obviously gay." Despite an outlandish premise, "Dumpster Diving With the Stars," the book's highlight, has real heart: A struggling novelist retreats into housewifery until she decides to compete on a reality television show against John Lithgow, a Playboy Playmate and Mario Batali. The book is riddled with pop culture allusions - from Beyoncé to Miley Cyrus to Lululemon. But these topical references might date the book and risk alienating readers unfamiliar with what's trending on TMZ. It is a critique raised only because this dark, deadpan and truly inventive collection is one you'll wish to relish long after its sell-by date.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Ellis' 12 short stories about women under pressure are archly, acerbically, even surreally hilarious. By extracting elements from the southern gothic tradition, Shirley Jackson, and Margaret Atwood, Ellis has forged her own molten, mind-twisting storytelling mode. Her pacing is swift and eviscerating, and her characters' rage and hunger for revenge are off the charts. In The Wainscoting War, two furious women in facing condos do diabolical battle via a barrage of increasingly alarming e-mails over the decor of their shared hallway. Ellis takes on reality TV in the perfectly crafted Dumpster Diving with the Stars, a breath-halting balance of slashing absurdist humor and rich and authentic emotional sensitivity. The same tricky strategy works powerfully in The Fitter, an ambushing fable of comedic invention and sneaky heartbreak. After reading Ellis, readers will never approach book club benignly again: think Fight Club (1996), instead. With monstrous children and cats, hopeless husbands, and covertly dangerous women, Ellis takes down the entire housewife concept with a sniper's precision. These are delectably revved up, marauding, sometimes macabre tales of ruined marriages, illness, infertility, crass commercialism (literary product placement), desperation, ghosts, even murder, featuring women of shrewd calculation, secret sorrows, and deep sympathy.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ellis, a professional poker player and author (Eating the Cheshire Cat), turns domesticity on its head in her darkly funny 12-story collection, featuring hausfraus in various stages of unraveling. These wives are not like the perfect 1970s-mom Carol Brady, the blue-collar Roseanne Conner, or even the tightly wound Claire Dunphy. Ellis immediately sets the tone in "What I Do All Day," about a modern Stepford Wife-she is "lucky enough to have a drawer just for glitter"-with bite. In the rest of the collection, women become involved in increasingly hostile epistolary e-fights over wainscoting in a shared hallway ("The Wainscoting War"), speak in codes that require translation ("Southern Lady Code"), and take their book club to a whole new level ("Hello! Welcome to Book Club"). One wife finds a fiendish way to contend with a domineering mother-in-law and the son she raised ("Dead Doormen"); another finds that having a significant following on social media doesn't save her from her book sponsor's ruthlessness in actually getting the thing written ("My Book Is Brought to You by the Good People at Tampax"). Ellis hits the satirical bull's-eye with a deliciously dry, smart voice that will have readers flipping the pages in delight. Agent: Susanna Einstein, Einstein Literary Management. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Ellis's (What Curiosity Kills) darkly funny collection is a box of bonbons laced with absinthe. Many of the stories feature books to some degree-deep knowledge of commercial fiction helps a character succeed on the reality show Dumpster Diving with the Stars; corporations sponsor novels (and those authors who lightly skim their contracts may be unpleasantly surprised by the consequences for missed deadlines); and a very intense book club has unusual expectations for new members-while others skewer such topics as bra fitting, escalating disputes with neighbors, and parsing the difference between what Southern ladies say and what they mean. Kathleen McInerney, Rebecca Lowman, Lisa Cordileone, and Dorothy Dillingham Blue provide appropriately sweet readings with real bite underneath. VERDICT Recommended for fans of quirky humor. ["The hilarity of each premise will pull in readers, and the twists will keep them glued to the pages": LJ 12/15 starred review of the Doubleday hc.]-Stephanie Klose, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. 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
The wives in these guffaw-out-loud short stories by novelist Ellis (The Turning Book: What Curiosity Kills, 2010, etc.) are a wonderfully wacky crew. At first glance, the women in this pointedly peculiar collection may seem like familiar charactersjealous wives, inconsiderate neighbors, procrastinating writersyet, often, it's not long before they and their stories build from a chug to a mad hurtle, take a sharp turn in an unexpected direction, and careen completely and crazily off the rails. In "The Wainscoting War," two neighbors correspond about their shared vestibule, and over the course of a handful of emails, build from "Thank you for the welcome gift basket you left outside our apartment door" to a high-stakes face-off in a common hallway at high noon. In "The Fitter," one of the book's sweeter, gentler stories, the wife of a small-town Georgia man with a "pilgrimage-worthy" gift for fitting women with the perfect bra"part good old boy, part miracle worker"reluctantly releases him to the woman she suspects will replace her after she succumbs to the illness that has rid her of her own "body meant for tight sweaters." In "Dead Doormen," a woman who initially appears to be a perfectly devoted housewife, catering to her husband's needs in the vast Manhattan prewar penthouse apartment left to him by his mother, slowly comes into focus as something significantly more sinister. The 12 stories here cheekily tackle subjects ranging from neighborhood book clubs to reality TV shows, and while a few of them feel, sadly, like filler, breaking up the madcap momentum, on the whole, they are deliciously dark and deliriously deranged. This amusingly offbeat collection treats us to an unusual array of characters as if it were offering up a plate of clever canapes. Maybe just don't try to devour them all at once. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
