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Reviewed
by Kristin Thiel
You know how sometimes you can’t tell if a person is joking or not—and
how you find yourself returning to his circle at the party after every
trip to the food table? Stephanie Dickinson is like that through her
writing.
She has whammies: “Eve and Ava’s
ten-month-old toes curl in their sleep like minnows. Under the Pampers
their purple skin unfurls. They are part puffer fish…Moon jelly Micah
lifts his three-year-old hands to the light, reaching, trying to smear
it over his face”. And careful follow-up that make us readers wonder,
does Trout, wife of a fisherman, mock the bait shop’s selection of
lures—“chartreuse, firetiger, kopper, and avocado—colors that sound
more like lipstick shades” —because she personally knows
better what fish like? Did she drink only water for breakfast because
she’s not a person but…?
Trout, the narrator of Dickinson’s A Caterpillar Feeds the Giant
Squid, turns out to be all human, pregnant with her fifth
child, married to a sugar-coated demanding Christian fundamentalist,
and generally overworked personally and professionally. The
alienation—or at least transformation—that the reader suspects at the
beginning is closer to the truth than not. Unfortunately the story’s
conclusion is not as deft as the rest of it. It turns from a tale about
the one that got away—and therefore remains grand in our minds—to the
one our line has caught before.
Two of Dickinson’s best stories in
this collection are its title story and A Lynching in Stereoscope,
the latter selected for inclusion in the Best American Nonrequired
Reading Series 2005. In Road of Five Churches,
the end is horrifying not only for the obvious reason but for what we
suspect will happen after the story ends. The young narrator wonders
earlier in the story, what if there is no “angel food cake,
strawberries so ripe they bleed when bitten”; by the end, we worry for
her, what if there is?
A
Lynching does an equally skilled dance of presenting a
layered tragedy that slowly grows and bursts. Not as fantastical as A Caterpillar... is,
this story haunts with reality’s wicked magic, in this case, rooms of
secrets kept in decorative containers, one shaped like a screaming
face, another “a lady box, the hair for ring storage and compartments
behind her breasts”. The photo in a found stereoscope blatently
explains the box’s contents.
If anything is lacking in
Dickinson’s first collection, it is that final step of critique from
the author. Beyond the relationship between home-caregiver Jelly’s skin
color and her elderly clients’, how does her recent-past situation
mirror that of Ciz’s, one of the people in the stereoscope photo? And
what does that say about how far—or rather, how little—we as a society
have progressed. In another pageturner, Kimchee, the reader
melts into the title character’s story, but as she asks herself at one
point, so we do too: “Kimchee panted, waiting for the vibrating to
subside. I’ve been somewhere. Have I brought any wisdom back”? The
young thief hallucinates a better, more spiritual and forgiving place
for herself while we the readers are left holding only the gold
bracelet Kimchee steals and then is moved to return.
Read an excerpt from one of the stories in this collection on Rain Mountain Press' website.
Kristin
Thiel
writes short fiction and book reviews and tries to keep news about
these current at www.kristinthiel.com. She is associate editor at
Indigo Editing & Publications, www.indigoediting.com, and is
fiction editor for WritersDojo.org.
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Publisher: Rain Mountain Press
Publication
Date:
Jan 2007
Paperback/Hardback?
Paperback
First
collection?: Yes
Author
bio: Originally from Iowa, Stephanie
Dickinson and her writing have traveled far
and wide—her work has appeared in Portland
Review, New York Stories, and Storyquarterly,
among many others. Her first novel, Half Girl, won the
2003 Hackney Award; in addition to that and Road of Five Churches,
Dickinson has also published Corn
Goddess.
Read
an interview
with Stephanie Dickinson
Buy this book (used or
new) from:
The
Publisher's Website: Rain Mountain Press
The Author's
website: StephanieDickinson.net
AbeBooks
BetterWorldBooks.Com
And...don't
forget your local booksellers and independent book shops! Visit IndieBound.org to find an independent bookstore near
you in the US
If
you liked this book you might also like....
Jonis Agee "A .38 Special and a Broken
Heart"
Janet Kauffman "Places in the World a Woman Could
Walk"
What
other reviewers thought:
Her Circle
Ezine
The
Compulsive Reader
Goodreads
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