Review by Booklist Review
A wedding, a dinner party, a vacation, and, yes, a funeral--all are worthy backdrops for celebrated fiction writer Hadley's exquisite examination of humanity's most perplexing foibles in her return to the short story. Jealousy and grief, regret and remorse, recrimination and apology are the familiar emotions and startling incentives negotiated as her protagonists confront life's quotidian moments and abrupt deviations. In "Men," two estranged sisters catch glimpses of each other in an old hotel yet fail to connect in person, stirring suppressed childhood memories. A misfit stepchild is rescued from an unsavory home in "Funny Little Snake," while a teenager's uncharacteristic moodiness upends an otherwise humdrum Italian holiday in "Cecelia's Awakening." The details surrounding her father's death years earlier become even murkier for the heroine of "The Other One." Hadley's short fiction shimmers with crystalline features of time, place, and character, and snaps with O'Henry-like electric diversions. Her characters' motivations are mysteries even unto themselves, as is cunningly displayed in the title story, in which a widow's affair with her boss snares her daughter in unforeseen ways.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hadley (Free Love) proves herself a magician of short fiction with this wonderful collection featuring characters whose epiphanies shift their conception of their lives. Many of the stories feature POV switches, coincidental encounters, and other literary devices that might not have worked if Hadley weren't so good at capturing moments of startling strangeness. In "Cecelia Awakened," a teenager travels with her parents to Florence, Italy, where she realizes they're simply tourists--at once outlandish and utterly unoriginal. While checking into their hotel, she picks up a flash of disdain from the manager directed at her father ("It was as if Cecelia had heard distinctly, in a moment when no one else was actually speaking, idle thought: Fussy little man"). In "Dido's Lament," a Londoner named Lynette quite literally bumps into her ex-husband, Toby, on the subway. A power play ensues when Toby invites Lynette to visit his new house. After Lynette leaves, Hadley shifts to Toby's perspective, where in his shame he has an unsettling thought about his new family and success. "The Other One" follows a girl whose grief over her father's death via car accident becomes complicated when it comes out that he was driving with his mistress and her female friend. Many years later, at a dinner party, the girl (now a woman) believes she has bumped into the mistress's friend, the eponymous "other one," toward whom she feels oddly warm. Readers will marvel over these twisty and masterly tales. (July)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Hadley's (Free Love) latest short-story collection examines the regrets, missed connections, and pathos of individuals reassessing their pasts and confronting perplexing new visions of themselves. Subtly yet precisely performed by actor Abigail Thaw, a frequent narrator of Hadley's works, many stories feature changing worldviews and self-revelations; "Funny Little Snake" follows Valerie, whose simmering resentment at her stepdaughter's visit turns to unbridled compassion when she sees the appalling circumstances the child came from. Hadley's knowing gaze is evident in the telling of "Cecelia's Awakening," which portrays a teenager on a family vacation who suddenly sees her myopic and hopelessly unsophisticated parents as others might. "Dido's Lament" exposes the chasms of almost willful misunderstanding that fuel even long-ended relationships, as ex-spouses maintain facades of happiness and stability while trying not to address uncomfortable truths about themselves. Listeners may be surprised by the stories' abrupt conclusions, signaled by Thaw with a gentle upward lilt that suggests continuation rather than closure. These uncertain endings are awkward but full of meaning, conveying the sense that there are no resolutions, happy or otherwise, and that life moves implacably forward. VERDICT A gorgeously narrated collection of shimmering, quietly powerful stories. For fans of Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories.--Sarah Hashimoto
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Families come in many varieties, all of them equally fraught, in a dozen new stories from British writer Hadley. Feckless bohemian parents get withering portraits in "My Mother's Wedding" (not her first, needless to say) and "Funny Little Snake"; the latter is a particularly poignant tale of a neglected 9-year-old girl and a second wife who reluctantly comes to feel responsible for her. These two stories, like many in the collection, stop rather than end with people poised on the brink of change and no guarantees things will turn out well. Hadley's work, very much in the realistic tradition of classic English fiction, is old-fashioned in the best sense: Characters' personalities and backstories are fully drawn and set against thickly detailed physical and social surroundings. The childhood home where three middle-aged sisters assemble to visit their hospitalized mother in "The Bunty Club" is "a stolid Victorian villa" set on a hillside dotted with houses "intended to accommodate a certain sort of privileged, discreet, unexceptional, unchanging middle-class existence--which had changed after all, because it hardly existed any longer." Hadley shifts through each of the at-odds sisters' perspectives, a frequent technique of hers to remind us that people's inner lives do not necessarily match others' views of them. This is particularly effective in "Dido's Lament," which portrays a chance encounter between a former husband and wife almost entirely from her point of view until the very end, when a glimpse into his thoughts shows that the comfortable, affluent post-divorce existence she has glimpsed with chagrin is "all so that [she] could get to visit it some day, and see that he'd managed to have a life without her." The mastery she has honed over a decades-long career makes Hadley's gaze as sharp as her empathy is expansive; each tale feels as satisfying as a full-length novel despite--or perhaps because of--the ambiguous endings. A pleasure to read, with characters and themes that linger long after the final page. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
