More like 4 1/2 stars. Some of the stories in this collection are really stellar, and I really like the way Rivecca writes. ( )

More like 4 1/2 stars. Some of the stories in this collection are really stellar, and I really like the way Rivecca writes. ( )

Good story collection, loosely organized around the theme of the desire to be believed, the urge to disclose vs. the wish not to have to disclose but be understood anyway. Some worked better than others, but a few were really affecting.

My friend Daniel and I did a joint review over at Like Fire. ( )

Astonishing. One of the best new collections I have read in a long time. She is enormously talented and these stories are beautifully crafted, fresh, exciting and powerful. She is a young Mary Gaitskill giving us the lives of these damaged girls. As one reviewer said their innocence if stripped away even before they had any. She has these moments where she unpacks some idea or reaction by the character that are utterly painfully beautiful. So effing good. ( )

There is a lot to like here, Rivecca writes well and the seven short stories are fresh and original, though a little dark and not for all.

The first story, “death is not an option”, put me off a bit as it seemed geared for a younger reader, but if that happens to you, give the others a try. I liked “yours will do nicely”, which was about a girl picking up a stranger in a bar, and her conflicted feelings about him and a male friend. “very special victims”, was excellent, about the aftermath in life to being molested by an uncle as a child; I found it both unflinchingly honest as well as subtle. Lastly “look, ma, i’m breathing” was also good, about a young author who wrote of having lied about seeing the Virgin Mary as a child and then later confessed; in searching for a place to rent, she runs across a somewhat creepy would-be landlord.

A little uneven but worth reading, and I will look for more from Rivecca.

Quotes:
On child abuse, this in trying to discern abuse as a teacher in “none of the above”:
“Alma knew the signs. Abused and neglected children were (a) withdrawn; (b) developmentally delayed; or (c) ‘acting out,’ a term she despised for its jargony inexactitude, but she knew it when she saw it. And Peter was none of the above.”

On children:
“She loved her students, all of them, even the ones she didn’t like. They broke her heart. Not because their lives were bad, but because she saw their personalities forming day to day and some of them had such charisma, such wily quirky charm, and others were so shy and kind, and once in a while she’d fleetingly recognize some familiar, adaptive, adultlike tic in their facial expressions or voices – the way they’d leap into a conversation to say their piece or brusquely brush off an advance would remind her of her favorite aunt, say, or her old boyfriend from college. And it was somehow sad to see such identifiable traits in such miniature packages, like baby animals whose paws were far too big for their bodies. The traits were so much more endearing in people who didn’t know how to wield them. Each child was a particular type of person – the type to bring a book on a plane to ward off garrulous strangers, the type to be a garrulous stranger – and they didn’t know it yet.”

On lust:
“She had never hated him before; she did now. She scrutinized him for a trace of the taut, hunted shiftiness men’s faces assumed when they were driven to be with her and didn’t know why. It was never sweet. They were never besotted, just stiffly, sullenly advancing as though shoved toward her from behind. Sometimes they looked at her like an animal eyeing an untrustworthy trainer; other times in a gauging, measuring way, like she was an obstruction they needed to lift and move to get what they wanted.”

On meeting someone, this is an excerpt from a letter in “yours will do nicely”:
“When you told me about putting the radio collar on the female wolf, I envied you. I want to find a beautiful wild thing and track it, be able to tell if it’s still alive from hundreds of miles away, be able to know I had once touched a killer while she was unconscious, briefly and vulnerably harmless for the first time in her life. I keep thinking of the wolf waking up in the snow hours later like a creature coming out of a spell, feeling that something about her was different but not knowing why, shaking the snow off her fur and running back into the trees, irreversibly changed, connected to someone now. And never knowing it. But on come cellular level I think she does know. Maybe that’s why she went so far away.
…
Choose life, said the Catholics. Choose life, said the pagans. I finally am, but not in the way either creed intended. I don’t want to know every little thing that’ll happen to me up until the day I die. I don’t want to follow the plan to a higher power. I think that meeting you, singling you out and asking you for something, was the first step toward a new way of being. And I am changed now. I am touched, and I walk into the woods knowing it.”

On sex:
“I usually hated it when men used the term ‘make love.’ It sounded so squishy and earnest, like some kind of craft project. But then Jason put his arms around me and finally I could feel him, his hands intelligently registering all my bones and my skin, his lips burrowed in the crook of my neck and shoulder, and it was ridiculous how this made me so instantly happy, so relieved I’d been granted something another girl had been denied. I imagined her German face stern and spare with deprivation, and wondered what she had done wrong, and what I had done right. I slid into that detached sated space of knowing someone wants me.”

On telling three consecutive boyfriends about being molested as a child:
“…to think of anything other than the men she had told, and what they had said to her. Things like, Some of the sex stuff, it’s not healthy. And, I am so so so sorry. And, Get over here. And, Nothing will ever hurt you again. And, Why did you let him? And, I can’t. And, What can I do? And, This is repetitive. And, Somewhere in the world people are starving. And, You have to tell me what feels good. And, I want to feel your clit on my tongue. Please, for me. What was the point of it all, this exhaustive cycle of call-and-response, disclosure, and reaction? She thought with relief of the fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh men, from whom she would never hear a word on the subject.
She heard sirens in the distance, wailing and persecutory, in hot pursuit of someone. She wondered who was being chased. Her first thought was of the uncle, but that couldn’t be: Who would have told, and why would they care? The one they should be chasing, she thought, was her. She imagined herself lying on pavement, the blue-uniformed silhouettes of men looming over her. How grateful she would be as she waited for them to deliver their most merciful line, that rote benediction bestowed on every single person in trouble: the insane and the reasonable, homeless and naked, innocent and guilty, uncles and nieces. You have the right to remain silent.

On therapy:
“A blind man with a dog who is beginning to resemble him – frowsy, leaking sighs and grunts, unnervingly mild – is asking you to justify your highly dysfunctional attitude toward your own romantic viability and you will not do it, you will not trot out the stock villains, you will not rehash the smug triteness of it all because it’s been done, it’s old: even the nightmares have the stale odor of a textbook.”

On writing:
“…she held the scotch in one hand and knew it was useless, knew that nothing would ever come out of her more purely or clearly than things like this: these distilled episodes, these illuminated lamentations, sculpted in all the right places, these testimonies of harm.” ( )