Aryn Kyle

The God of Animals reminded me a great deal of A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, very harsh and Shakespearean. Making your living off the land is a hard way to go, and trying to be a poor horse rancher catering to the rich takes all the vicissitudes of working with nature and mixes it with the crushing burden of the class system. A reverence for life is constantly at war with an indifference to the living. This is a very harsh and very good book.

I don’t usually care much for short stories; I don’t understand them most of the time, and so they bore me. This collection is different. It grabbed me from the first paragraph and never let go. In each of these eleven stories about young women and girls (and one young boy), I recognized either myself or people I know. There are many, many ways that a woman can mess up her life, and several of these ways are brought to living, breathing, despairing life in these tales. It’s uncanny how show more vivid these short tales are, despite dealing with the mundane situations of life.

Affairs with married men, trying too hard to be accepted, allowing a betrayal to ruin one’s life, compulsive lies- they’re all here, bad choices aplenty. In all these stories, you have the feeling that these lives could have reached dead ends, but you keep hoping for these people. Each story *does* end with the possibility that these lives can be turned around. These are stories about women and girls, but it’s not chick lit. show less

Two stories here work for me: "Captains Club" and the title story, "Boys and Girls Like You and Me". I'd give "Captains Club" 3.5 or 4 stars and "Boys and Girls Like You and Me" 3 or 3.5. In the rest, most of the characters (mostly female), except some children who come out pretty well, are just awful, and not in particularly poignant or interesting ways. They seem to have just given in to the worst of life in a defeatist way. They can't get over anything, they can't make anything of show more themselves, they are defined by their victimhood, they choose debasement, they are spiteful. As a reader, rather than feeling bad for them or empathizing with them, I just felt polluted by their attitudes, their selfishness, their laziness. show less

This collection of short stories is one of the best explorations of female emotion and depth that I have read in a very long time. While there are a couple of times I found myself wanting to stop reading, as I was fed up with the bleakness of the female existence and pitiful nature of some of the characters, I forced myself to venture on. For that, I am very thankful.

This is a strong reminder that humanity has rough spots, and that women of all ages deal with pain and sadness in a very show more distinct set of ways. There are the bitches. There are the loners. There are the women who cycle through complacency and paranoia. And I could recognize a piece of myself in each of these stories.

However, I have to say, one of the strongest stories has a lead male. "Captain's Club" is one of the saddest tales I have ever read. show less