Elizabeth Cohen (2)

The Hypothetical Girl by Elizabeth Cohen is a collection of short stories of love, identity and internet.

Each character is looking for love online, usually a transformative love that will solve everything and bring brilliance to the mundane. They each want so very desperately to meet and connect with someone else online.

There’s a hint of the bizarre running through the book, but isn’t meeting and falling in love kind of bizarre anyway? Cohen’s characters pretend to be Icelandic yak show more farmers while living a perfectly average life, or pretend a normal life over unpleasant circumstances. They pretend, through the magic of online profiles and early conversations, to be just slightly better than they are. Each story plays on the themes of misrepresenting oneself and of discovering something unexpected. I don’t want to recap any one of the short stories because I think a summary of events would miss the real point.

Full Review at The Hypothetical Girl :: Simpson's Paradox show less

A well-written memoir about life with a one=year old child and an eighty year old father with Alzheimer's. The author, a journalist for a local periodical in upstate New York, tells the story of living in the harsh winter after having moved from Arizona, being abandoned by her husband after only 2 mos of her father's coming, and dealing with the rising linguistic abilities of her daughter, and the lose of words and memories on her father's part.

"Daddy walks around now this way, dropping show more pieces of language behind him. The baby following picking them up." and she sums up her part of the story when she says "Writing gives me a sense of control. It has it's own special alchemy. I can make what is terrible turn beautiful." The story is poignant in its outlook, but surprisingly not a tear jerker. It is inspiring. show less

Great book of forgetting and remembering-- records a year in which the author cared for both her Alzheimer dad and her one year old daughter. Comedy and sadness go hand in hand, lovely writing-- great scene where she thinks of people in Africa needing to be rescued during a flood.

If you are single and an adult in this day and age, chances are you have either seriously checked out, flirted with, or used the services of some sort of online dating service. Elizabeth Cohen recognizes this modern-day trend and, in a series of short stories, outlines some of the sadder and more pitiful stories that can emerge from the online dating world. The Hypothetical Girl is a collection of short stories that is witty, funny, and sometimes painfully accurate in portraying life in the show more modern, technological world.

Read the rest of this review at The Lost Entwife on Dec. 4, 2013. show less