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Product Description
With the stories in her first collection, Elizabeth Stuckey-French establishes herself as a smart new voice in American fiction and stakes her claim to a territory somewhere on the edge of stability, where normal is not just boring but nearly impossible, and where standing out in a crowd may just cause isolation.
Her characters, mostly Midwesterners, are bizarre but endearing. A reform school graduate is placed in the care of her psychic aunt and in the servitude of a lucrative dog retrieval scheme. A mother who has accepted her son’s modest employment selling blue jeans bemoans the above-board lifestyle she discovers him leading as a wanted criminal. A rehab counselor lives vicariously through her already pregnant stepdaughter’s love affair with a drunk who spends his days in recovery and his nights in the bar.
Full of wry wit, tender sympathy, and heartland attitude, The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa is as strange, funny, and poignant as the real world it resembles.
Amazon.com Review
Midwestern weirdness from a writer who seems genuinely to love her square-peg characters. In The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa, Elizabeth Stuckey-French is absorbed by that eternal question: Who's to say what's normal, anyway? Her opening story, "Junior," deals with a young girl who tries to drown a fellow swimmer at a pool; her shady, dog-psychic aunt is called upon to rehabilitate her. In her final entry, "The Visible Man," Althea, an old woman in a state mental institution, gets a visit from her former employer. She had cleaned for Rona for many years and now Rona takes her home for lunch. As Althea roams her former place of work, Stuckey-French subtly inverts the balance of power between boss and employee, sane and insane. When Rona announces that the place is haunted, Althea does "a quick mental inventory of Rona's obsessions over the years--was this one the most absurd ever? Yup." Althea may live in an asylum, but she's no more insane than chatelaine Rona--maybe saner, and certainly smarter.
The ubiquity of nuttiness is also the theme of the lovely story "Electric Wizard," in which the parents of a dead boy visit his poetry teacher, looking for clues to their son's suicide. The woman can't recall any poems the boy wrote in class, so she and her daughters sort of, well, make some up. As her daughter spouts invented verse, the teacher is forced to see that no parent can know her children utterly. They're growing too quickly. As the evening wears down, she thinks, "I wanted to gather it all in, to capture and hold it somehow, and keep us for a while just as we were, before we became whatever it was we were going to be." Here are characters who are uncomfortable with themselves, people with no right place in the world. Stuckey-French makes art of awkwardness. --Claire Dederer
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