Patient, female Stories

Women and girls are sorely tested in 13 stories by the author of the Thurber Prize--winning comic novelDear Committee Members (2014). There's no getting around it: Schumacher's stories are animated by grim circumstances. There are dead, missing, hurt, and struggling children. There are hospital visits. There are newly dead parents and neglectful ones. There's a drug overdose and a serious car accident. And yet the noteworthy thing about these stories is that the best of them are damn funny. In "Passengers," the spiraling, self-absorbed mother of an 8-year-old girl who accidentally sends a classmate to the hospital thinks, "Let there be some things in life that I receive without earning or deserving them." In "Urn," two adult siblings have a disagreement--what should they do with their newly dead mother's ashes?--that culminates in a wet and dirty urn. In "Resurrection Hockey," the narrator and her longtime best friend, whose 7-year-old son has died, have a chance to recapture their high school glory when their old field hockey team is revived. Even Schumacher's short descriptions, for which she has a gift, drolly reinforce the collection's pall of bad tidings: A minibar is "equipped with the usual firing squad of bottles," and there are "hedges of violently flowering hibiscus." It's only when Schumacher settles on more familiar and sensational plots--a mother looking for a missing child, a mother driving her teenage daughter to a treatment facility for her eating disorder--that the narratives seem to forbid levity, making these pieces airless in comparison. The women and girls who anchor these stories aren't having much fun, but it's the rare reader who won't, albeit perhaps rather guiltily. Stories as funny as they are dark. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.