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Summary
Summary
Clothed, Female Figure opens a singular investigation of women: mothers, daughters, gardeners, housecleaners, employers, aunts, nannies, friends. There are dispatches from haloed single-girl apartments in New York, from the horsetail scrubland behind the beach club, from the house behind the linden tree where the first baby was born. An overgrown back garden becomes the shrouded stage for a reunion. A Russian nanny guards a secret. A new wife subverts housekeeping to outflank her mother-in-law. An alcoholic daughter is haunted by her mother's disappearance.
Through ten independent but thematically linked stories, Allio conjures women in conflict and on the edge, who embrace, battle, and transcend their domestic dimensions.
Author Notes
Kirstin Allio's novel, Garner , was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 award, a PEN/O. Henry prize, and other honors for her short stories and essays. She lives in Providence, RI with her husband and sons.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The debut short story collection by National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree Allio (Garner) presents eloquent and sophisticated investigations into the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. Allio's characters often suffer great losses, as in "Millennium," in which a young woman makes an abrupt move to New York City after the death of her mother, and "Still Life," a portrait of a wife and mother who is left reeling after the mysterious suicide of a close friend. Another story, the lovely "Quetzal," examines the inner life of an alcoholic academic whose mother abandoned her at age 11. Many of the stories hinge on the revelation of a secret, such as when the narrator of "The Other Woman" learns about a long-ago deception on behalf of her mother, or when the Russian émigré narrator of the beautiful and exceptionally moving title story, having worked a lifetime as a nanny, finally faces painful truths about her familial past after receiving a series of letters from a former charge. The women populating this collection are often confined to small, domestic spaces, which Allio describes with great intimacy and perfectly chosen details. These stories are sometimes deceptively slow to reveal their true subjects, as in "Charm Circle," when the perspective shifts from mother to daughter halfway through the story to surprising effect. Taken as a whole, the collection paints a panoramic portrait of the bonds between mothers and daughters, the complicated fierceness of their love, and the anguish and confusion that accompanies loss. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A hostel-hopping teenager fleeing her overprotective parents. A Russian psychotherapist turned nanny who receives strange, confiding letters from one of her long-ago charges. A snowed-in mother of four who averts sudden disaster. These are only a few of the riveting female characters perceptively portrayed by Allio (Garner, 2005) in her singular new collection. Focused on women experiencing all stages of life, these stories delve deep into the inner voices of characters poised on the edge of great change. In The Other Woman, Allio subverts the conventional meaning of the phrase to depict a young newlywed struggling to balance allegiances between the memory of her mother and her new mother-in-law. Madrona shows in flashback how a bad love affair springs from a chance encounter with a classmate's father. And in the standout title story, two first-person narratives intertwine: Natasha's reflections on a neglected girl, and the girl's own letters, which tell a disturbing story. The story's end, in which a sickening secret is revealed, delivers a gut-punch of emotion. Spiked with rich yet compressed language, these thematically linked stories should win Allio wide notice among literary-fiction readers. Fans of Alice Munro and Lucia Berlin will find much to admire here.--Tedrowe, Emily Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
The stories in this collection take readers to New York or Providence, RI, neighborhoods, or to a university, probably Brown, all locations the author knows well. But the territory plumbed in depth is the interior world of women's relationships, especially when tested by loss, loneliness, or as in one story, a mother/infant bond so intense the mother can't bring herself to send out birth announcements. In another, a suburban mom mourns the sudden death of a best friend. Plot complications can be quirky. In the title story, a Russian nanny receives letters from a former charge, a young woman who is now an au pair in a compromising situation. In "The Other Woman," a daughter remembers her mother, a janitor at a college who passed herself off as a postdoc and graded papers for a female professor; after her mother's death from breast cancer, the daughter meets the hoodwinked academic. VERDICT An impressive first collection from a promising new voice in women's literary fiction. Allio's (Garner) prose is lush with imagery, and the story lines are revealed obliquely, making even domestic dramas profound and mysterious.-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
