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Loading... Lucky Girls: Stories (edition 2003)by Nell Freudenberger
Work InformationLucky Girls: Stories by Nell Freudenberger
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. I loved this book! ( ) "The Orphan" This is the short story of a family splintering in different directions. The parents are separated and on the verge of getting a divorce. The nearly adult children are in Thailand and Bangor, Maine - worlds apart from one another. When the family converges in Bangkok it is an orphan that shifts the tide for them all, individually and as a family. I can't decide if I like Alice or not. As a mother, what should she have done when her kid calls up and says not only has she been assaulted, but raped as well? That's not the sort of thing you let drop when the kid suddenly changes her story and says it's no big deal. Lines I liked, "She drops the dog, possibly robbing him mother of his life" (p 31) and "...often, when you step around the conventional way of doing things, you end up with something worse" (p 56). "Outside the Eastern Gates" The protagonist in "Outside the Eastern Gate" is like any 40 year old person facing the deteriorating aging of a parent. There is a sense of bafflement at the role reversal; a sense of sadness about being away for so long. Upon returning to Delhi she remembers the desperate longing for her mother's love while simultaneously coping with her father's Alzheimer diagnosis. A line to like, "The bogeyman appears in the first forty seconds after nightfall" (p 68). Good to know. I loved the first two and last two stories - was sort of baffled by the middle one ("Outside the Eastern Gate"). From "The Orphan" p. 52 Alice thinks of the incredible frustration of not knowing things, and of knowing that they can't be known - the incredible privacy of people's experience. From "The Tutor" p. 113 Homesickness was like any other illness: you couldn't remember it properly. From "Letter From the Last Bastion" p. 176 My mother says that if you're always thinking about how things are going to be in your life, you can never be happy. p. 192 He'd grown accustomed to the happiness of *waiting* to see her. A letter from her could change an impossible day into a bearable one. p. 220 That's something Henry's noticed about writing novels: even when you make things up, they tend to come true eventually. p. 223 And what are we going to do now, because I believe in science, but my mother, whom I love so much...my mother believes in angels. p. 224 Everyone looks different in real life than they do in pictures, just the way that they sound different in writing than they do when they talk. People disagree about which one is more honest. Personally, I like having time to figure out what I mean before I say it. no reviews | add a review
First highlighted in The New Yorker fiction issue, here is award-winning writer Nell Freudenberger's debut story collection Lucky Girls is a collection of five novella-like stories, which take place mostly in Asia. The characters--expatriates, often by accident--are attracted to the places they find themselves in a romantic way, or repelled by a landscape where every object seems strange. For them, falling in love can be inseparable from the place where it happens. Living according to unfamiliar rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unique ways. In the title story, a young woman who has been involved in a five-year affair with a married Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death. The protagonist of "Outside the Eastern Gate" returns to her childhood home in Delhi, to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother, who left her family for a wild journey over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. In "Letter from the Last Bastion," a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a novelist who's built his reputation writing about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and who, in his letters, confides in her a secret about his past. Highly anticipated in the literary community and beyond, Lucky Girls marks the debut of a very special talent that places her among today's most gifted young writers. No library descriptions found. |
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