"Riding the Doghouse" by Randy DeVita

“Riding the Doghouse” by Randy DeVita (2006)
First Published in West Branch, No. 58 Spring/Summer
Reprinted in The Best American Short Stories® 2007


I have actually read several short stories from the collection. However, I have had a difficult time with preparing their reviews. I am not sure why. Part of it, I must admit, is that I am used to having a story and its characters develop over time, thus I get to know them better – or at least feel as if I do. When the narrative is shortened, I must look a little deeper and work a little harder at comprehending the author's intent. Of course, this is why I joined this challenge. I wanted to stretch myself, and my sensibilities as a reader.

Previously, the only short stories I have read were ghost or horror stories; ones that are perfect for camp-outs and pajama parties. I loved them as a child, and I still do.

I think that is why I was drawn to this particular story by Randy DeVita. For it seems that not all ghosts prowl about creepy mansions in the middle of the night. Some live in the deep recesses of our memories: lurking, waiting, haunting.

As with other, classic ghost stories I remember, this one begins in the darkness of early morning:

“A storm outside. Beside me the soft breath of my wife shifts the covers that we share. I am dozing, trapped between midnight and dawn, and in my half-sleep, I listen as rain sleets against our bedroom window; oak branches, stripped by autumn, scrape at the back of the house. A surge of electrons excites the air; my ears hum. There is a violent crash, like a shattered windshield, and thunder drums past like traffic on the interstate. The windows rattle in their frames.
My eyes snap open.”

It is not only the storm that has awakened the narrator. And to explain why, would mean spoilers.

According to the author, this story derived at a time when he had

“...been writing, with alarming consistency, pretty forgettable horror stories – stories far too consciously intended to scare others. So I challenged myself to write about something I feared,”

He also acknowledges that while revising the story, he discovered it was also a story about a relationship – that “Maybe that’s enough for a story – two people speaking to each other in a closed space, unwilling or unable to say what they really mean.”

In my opinion he succeeded in writing about both.

Sometimes the ghosts are of our own making. And that it is not what we say, but what we have not said, which haunts us.

(Review also posted here)

Black Thorn, White Rose - Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling

The second in the fairy tale anthologies collected by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Again it contains short stories that are adult re-tellings of fairy tales. This time there are 18 tales by 18 different authors with the only cross overs from the first in the series being Susan Wade, Nancy Kress and Jane Yolen with Susan Wade writing the only completely original tale in the collection again.

Worlds Like Pale Stones - Nancy Kress
A re-telling of Rumplestiltskin looking at the magic of words and the power of knowledge. Ludie is the daughter of a drunk and a boastful washerwoman who tells people she can spin straw into gold. She is taken to the Prince and told if she cannot spin gold she will be killed. A rat-boy comes to her aid, one of the Old Ones, and when she spins gold she is forced to marry the Prince. She gives birth to the savage Dirk before finally running away when a woman who can spin straw into diamonds is found.

Stronger Than Time - Patricia C Wrede
A bittersweet look at Sleeping Beauty. A Prince appears on the doorstep one evening of a woodcutter and persuades him to help him reach the keep contained within the thorns. He claims there is an enchantment within caused by the Count insulting a witch-woman at the christening of his daughter. She laid a curse that on the girls sixteenth birthday she would die, but the Queen was able to counter it keeping her alive for 100 years safe in her resting place. She was very specific and her magic was to cause a specific Prince to arrive to set her free the day after the 100 years had passed. Unfortunately the Prince was impatient and arrived a day too early and was killed by the thorns. This new Prince is a relative of the one who died and has come to finish the task.

Samnus's Fair Maid - Ann Downer
Another Sleeping Beauty tale. The roles are slightly reversed and it is the male who has the sleeping sickness which his Aunt believes can be cured by a kiss from the one he loves.

The Frog King or Iron Henry - Daniel Quinn
A look at what happened to the Frog King after he was rewarded by the Princess for bringing back her golden ball. Scattered bits of information recalled by one with amnesia.

Near Beauty - M E Beckett
A strange science fiction tale if a sleeping beauty and an amphibian. Amanda talks to the three foot toad she finds in her boyfriends shower called Kane and they strike up a friendship that no one else knows about. An odd tale that sees them leaving and her becoming the Pilot for the Carnival the toad is in.

Ogre - Michael Kandel
Another strange tale about an ameatur dramatics group putting on a fairy tale performance of "The Yellow Dwarf". One of the cast members is an ogre who eats human flesh sandwiches prepared by his mother. When the director is fired by the ogre-like Connie, it is the ogre who is kind and thanks him for his direction.

Can't Catch Me - Michael Cadnum
A look at The Ginger-Bread Man. He is born in a hot oven before escaping into the cold world. On escaping from his parents and running away from them and his neighbour who chases him with a pitch fork, he stops long enough to repeatedly taunt those chasing him. He crosses a rinver on the head of a river fox who eats him all up, but ginger doesn't agree with foxes and the parts brought back up run away faster!

Journey Bread Recipie - Lawrence Schimel
A strange, short poem on how a wolf, child and hood for grandma can be made into bread. I very much enjoyed this short poem:
"5. Now crack the wolf and sseperate the whites -
the large eyes, the long teeth - from the yolks."

The Brown Bear of Norway - Isabel Cole
A classic Scandinavian tale in the "animal bridegroom" folklore tradition.It implies that the sorcery of shapeshifting is not to different from the magic used in turning from adolescence to adulthood.It follows a young girl living in New York who has a boy from Norway in her class. He gives her an address of someone back home who wants a penpal. They begin to write to each other and he signs his letters The Brown Bear of Norway. He starts to visit her in the evenings and tells her not to look at him, but one day she cannot resist and he is gone. She learns Norwegian and tracks him to his homeland, eventually finding him changed from a bear to the boy she knew from school.

The Goose Girl - Tim Wynne-Jones
Tells the story from the viewpoint of the Prince in the traditional tale. For a lark a Princess and her chambermaid exchange places before they meet the Prince the Princess has been sent to marry. Things go a little further than planned with the Prince marrying the chambermaid and the Princess being sent to work with the geese. The Old King realises what has happened and asks the chambermaid what punnishment someone who had done something like this should recieve, and then committs this punnishment upon her. Things do not quite end happily ever after as the new Queen is cold and unforgiving on the Prince.

Tattercoats - Midori Snyder
A lovely tale of Lilian who has been married to Edward for 7 years before feeling something is missing from their marriage. Her mother, the Queen, gives her a series of impressive gifts including a tattered coat made of animal skins which she says is the most important as it will teach her about herself. Lilian tries wearing the different beautiful dresses to attract her husbands attention, but ends up wearing the tattered coat on a bridge and seducing her husband. They begin to meet in secret, her hidden in the furs and him unsure who she is, until one day after they have rebuilt their marriage she decides it is the final meeting and she is going to tell the truth. Turns out Edward was not so unsuspecting afterall.

Granny Rumple - Jane Yolen
Yolen's take on Rumplestiltskin using her Granny as the main storyteller and the sad murder of her husband for being Jewish. It brought a lovely personal twist to the well known tale.The

Sawing Boys - Howard Waldrop
Based on a tale I didn't know called "The Bremen Town Musicians" and retold in the South of America. A group of people end up in a small town in Kentucky intent on mischief and murder, until they are dissuassed by local musicians entering the towns music contest.

Godson - Roger Zelazny
A very cool tale about David who has a very interesting Godfather. It is based on a Brothers Grimm tale and I don't want to say too much as it will spoil the story and it is one of the best in the collection.

Ashputtle - Peter Straub
A strange and unsettling tale about a Kindergarden teacher called Mrs Asch. She is excellent at her job although it is unclear whether she even likes the children she teaches and their parents. Every so often a child or parent goes missing from where she teaches and the implication is that she is killing them. Each time she moves on with no suspiscion to another town.

Silver and Gold - Ellen Stribar
A poem baed on Little Red Riding Hood looking at the path we take through life and the wolves we face in the real world. It is sometimes hard to tell the difference between the ones who love you and the ones who will eat you alive.

Sweet Bruising Skin - Storm Constantine
A wonderful re-telling of The Princess and the Pea told from the eyes of the Princes mother who is a cruel sorceress. Lots of alchemy, magic and death, the story looks at what happens after the Prince marries the Princess with the bruised skin. My favourite in the collection by far.

The Black Swan - Susan Wade
An original tale looking at how far women will go to transform themselves to a particular ideal of feminine beauty. Ylianna is dark to her cousins light and desires to change everything about herself secretly. When she unveils herself to everyone in the Kingdom including Prince Sigfried they all fall in love with her. However, she is accused of having an affair with the kind servant who helped her to transform (the narrator of the tale) and Sigfried openly denies her. She rushes upstairs and throws herself off the balcony, but instead of hearing her body hit the ground a beautiful black swan flies away to freedom.

My absolute favourite was Sweet Bruising Skin. It was interesting to sympathise with such a controlling tryant rather than the innocent Princess. I also really enjoyed The Black Swan, Silver and Gold, Godson (perhaps my second favourite), Tattercoats, The Goose Girl, The Brown Bear of Norway and Journey Bread Recipie. It took me a little longer to get into this anthology as the first stories didn't appeal to me as much, but I am so glad I stuck with it as they got much better.

Melisande by E. Nesbit

When Princess Melisande was born, her mother, the Queen, wished to have a christening party, but the King put his foot down, and said he would not have it.

"I've seen too much trouble come of christening parties," said he. "However carefully you keep your visiting book, some fairy or other is sure to get left out, and you know what that leads to. Why, even in my own family the most shocking things have occurred. The Fairy Malevola was not asked to my great-grandmother's christening – and you know all about the spindle and the hundred years' sleep."

This is a lovely subversive fairytale, written by Edith Nesbit, author of Five Children and It, and several other magical children's stories set in Victorian London. She is probably most famous for The Railway Children, but all her stories are full of wonderfully pragmatic characters and in this one, subtitled "Long and Short Division", the royal parents are no exception.

When the King and Queen return from their daughter's christening they are greeted by some seven hundred irate fairies, insisting that a party has been held without them – that there has been a christening is self-evident and, since this must therefore constitute a chistening party, they will give their presents now. At the forefront, of course, is Malevola, who announces that, as her present, the princess will be bald. Just as the next fairy is about to make her gift, the King intervenes: have they forgotten that fairies who break traditions are snuffed out? Do they realise the risk they are running? "Only one bad fairy is ever forgotten at a christening party and the good ones are always invited; so either this is not a christening party or else you were all invited except one, and, by her own showing, that was Malevola. It nearly always is."

Having bested the fairies, this splendid king goes on to show more common sense over his now-bald infant. He has an unused wish from his fairy godmother, and asks her permission to hand it on to Melisande, but not until she grows up – after all, she might grow hair anyway, or she might prefer something else. All may yet be well.

Unfortunately the princess, happy to please her mother, manages to wish for hair that never stops growing. Nesbit goes on to weave in subversive references to other fairy stories including, of course, Rapunzel - though in this story poor Melisande is forced out of her window by her ever-growing hair. The usual recourse of finding a "competent" hero is futile until the arrival of Prince Florizel but, rather than effecting a miraculous cure in the manner of fairytale princes, he manages to make matters worse.

I love the unexpected twists and turns and complications in this story - I wondered if poor Melisande would ever be able to marry her prince and live happily ever after, though you could tell from their conversations that they were ideally suited. It's a perfect introduction to fairy tales, in that the conventions are all observed: the appropriate players - King and Queen, princess, fairies, princes - line up on stage, the narrator explains and interprets for the reader, adversity is faced with the proper incomprehension by the host of suitors before the hero arrives to overcome it with courage and ingenuity, the princess is amenable to falling in love with the right prince. Yet the path of this tale never runs entirely smoothly from one element to the next, keeping the reader entranced until the end.

Cross-posted at the Geranium Cat's Bookshelf.

High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories

High Spirits: A Collection of Ghost Stories by Robertson Davies


Pages: 198
First Published: 1982
Rating: 3/5

Comments: A collection of stories Davies wrote each year as Master of Massey College. These stories are funny, witty and satirical. Some stand out much more than others. These are best read slowly, one here, one there as they do have a sameness to them that tires. Recommended for fans of Davies.

Follows is a brief synapses (without spoilers) and my opinion on each story.

How The High Spirits Came About - In the introduction, Davies explains how every Christmas for the 18 years he was the Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto he would tell a ghost story. This is a collection of these 18 tales. The stories are parodies of the classic ghost story.

#1) Revelation From a Smoky Fire - in this story the current and first Master of Massey College finds in his rooms a man who professes to be the ninth Master of Massey College one hundred years hence, and we soon find our narrator is not who he seems to be.

#2) The Ghost Who Vanished By Degrees - this was a fun story of a ghost, who killed himself because he failed his PhD thesis, who takes our narrator hostage one night and makes him listen to the many thesis he has prepared since his death as he shall never be at peace until he has it.

#3) The Great Queen is Amused - This was a really fun story! A woman doing research in the university library (which is known for its Canadian Lit. collection) comes across an occult book which tells how to call a spirit. Thinking she'd like to ask Sara Jeanette Duncan a few questions she follows the instructions but ends up with a room full of the spirit of every Canadian author whose book is in the library. Very funny!

#4) The Night of the Three Kings - Our narrator investigates noises and winds up in a filing room where he finds the spirit of King George V searching for a rare stamp he accidentally once put on an envelope. The story ends with a definite Canadian twist.

#5) The Charlottetown Banquet - The narrator spends the night having a Victorian dinner with Sir John A. MacDonald.

#6) When Satan Goes Home For Christmas - This time our narrator meets Satan who is upset because he is never invited home for Christmas.

#7 Refuge of Insulted Saints - Hearing a knock at the door one evening our narrator opens the door to find Babs (otherwise known as Saint Barbara, Patron Saint of Artillery) standing at his door with a cannon pointing at him. She and many other saints who have just been deposed to legend status by Pope Paul VI (1969)are seeking asylum at the college. This was a lot of fun and very witty!

#8 Dickens Digested - A young man working on his thesis about Charles Dickens becomes more and more like Dickens himself. Lots of fun Dickensian-speak but not as good as other stories here.

#9 The Kiss of Khrushchev - A Russian exchange student, a member of the choir, disappeared some years ago but now our narrator has found a singing frog in the basement. This story was just plain weird.

#10 - The Cat That Went to Trinity - There are two new students in class this year. One named Elizabeth Lavenza the other named Enstein, given name Victor Frank. This gives our narrator cause for concern especially since he is teaching the Gothic novel this year. This was a really fun story, melodramatic and witty.

#11 - The Ugly Spectre of Sexism - I didn't really get this one very much. Written in 1972 it pokes fun at both feminism and chauvinism.

#12 - The Pit Whence Ye Are Digged - Another one that went over my head. This one dealt with poetry and time travel.

#13 - The Perils of the Double Sign - The narrator has a conversation with a small devil who has been trapped by a student whose hobby is astrology.

#14 - Conversations with the Little Table - Our narrator brings home an antique table which commences to tap around as if dancing. He and his wife sit down and find that the table once belonged to William Lyon Mackenzie King and he has a conversation with them. Another fun one.

#15 - The King Enjoys His Own Again - The spirits of King George IV and Bishop John Strachan debate with each other. I don't know anything about these people so I didn't enjoy this one much.

#16 - The Xerox in the Lost Room - Another fun one this time. The spirit of a poor relation immigrates to Canada when his manor is brought here and re-assembled. The manor is then opened up to the public and the ghost has had enough so he goes to the college and asks our narrator for asylum.

#17 - Einstein and the Little Lord - This was hilarious! As Einstein is visiting with our narrator, Little Lord Fauntleroy appears begging for Einstein's help in Paradise.

#18 - Offer of Immortality - A strange little man who is very cold and drinks a lot of vinegar, claims he is over 450 years old and offers Davies the opportunity to live forever.

Best American Short Stories 2007

I have just finished two short story collections that I have been reading from for a few months. I've decided I'll just make a post to blog when I finish a collection. Here is my brief opinion of the stories with no spoilers.



The Best American Short Stories 2007
Edited by Stephen King

Pages: 411
First Published: 2007
Rating: 3/5

Comments: An interesting collection of short stories by different authors with no common theme. The stories range from the mundane to the strange, from love stories to death stories. For me the best stories in the collection were in the first half of the book leaving the second half very underwhelming for me. None of the stories stick out as being absolutely fabulous but there are some that were very good. Overall, a decent collection of stories most suited to the literary reader. Follows are my brief synopses of each story (with no spoilers) with my thoughts.

1. Pa's Darling by Louis Auchincloss - set in the sixties, a woman reflects on how her larger than life father overshadowed her life. Readable, but didn't really do anything for me.

2. Toga Party by John Barth - This story takes place in an affluent gated retirement community and centers around one aged couple who are invited by the new people on the street to their toga-themed housewarming party. I really enjoyed this. The characterization of this seventy-something couple was wonderful and I found it to be a fast-paced read with a startling climax. I would be interested in reading more by Barth.

#3. Solid Wood by Ann Beattie - An elderly man and his sister have dinner with the recent widow of his best friend. There are some undercurrents that come to light for the reader as the dinner progresses. I didn't enjoy this one at all. It basically had no plot and, frankly, was boring. There is more to the story than appears at first but I prefer to read and think "wow, that was good" rather than "hmm, I wonder what this means".

#4. Balto by T.C. Boyle - A man and his 12-year-old daughter are on their way to court. This story recounts the events that lead up to the trial. The plot is more involved but any further description would contain spoilers. I was eager to read this story as Boyle is on my list of authors I'd like to read one day and this was my first sampling of his. I wasn't disappointed. This was a compelling story with a fast-paced read. I loved this one.

#5. Riding the Doghouse by Randy Devita - An eerie, disquieting story of father and son. A man remembers back to the year he was twelve and accompanied his trucker father for a week in the summer. The uneasiness in this story slowly builds and I really enjoyed it.

#6. My Brother Eli by Joseph Epstein - A man's younger brother (in his seventies) commits suicide and the older brother tells the story of his life. He was a famous writer, self-centered, egotistical, married five times with various children the brother has never met. The author contemplates whether an 'artist' is entitled to special rights and should be excluded from normal, decent behaviour because of their 'gift'. This story was longer than the others in this collection I've read so far and by far the best up to this point. It made me wish for a whole novel about these characters.

#7. Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You? by William Gay - I can't give a plot summary of this because I haven't a clue. I don't know what it was about or what it meant and what's with all the dialogue and no quotation marks? Ugh.

#8. Eleanor's Music by Mary Gordon - This was beautifully written and a haunting story. Eleanor is 51 and though she was married once she has lived with her parents for the last 18 years. They lead a lovely, simple old-fashioned life. Even their language to each other is quaint, as if from another generation. At first I felt nostalgic for their life and thought it was beautiful but slowly an uneasiness arises as we realize Eleanor's life is not what it seems on the surface. Then something drastic happens to her whole conception of her life and what she does and doesn't do after that event leaves this as a haunting tale.

#9. L. DeBard and Aliette: A Love Story by Lauren Groff - The title calls this a love story and it is that but it is also a tragedy of epic proportions. When I finished reading this my first thought was a stunned, "Wow." Set in 1918 this is the tragic love story of a former Olympic medalist swimmer and a young woman stricken with polio. The best story in this collection so far.

#10. Wake by Beverly Jensen - An interesting story of family dynamics. A brother and sister accompany their father's coffin as they bring him home for his funeral.

#11. Wait by Roy Kesey - Not impressed with this one at all. A bunch of people wait in an airport terminal as their flight is delayed over and over again.

#12 Findings & Impressions by Stellar Kim - I quickly realized this story was about someone dying of cancer so I skipped it as I don't read about that topic.

#13 Allegiance by Aryn Kyle - Glynnis and her parents have recently moved to America from England and she finds herself in the position of new girl at school. An unpopular girl has made moves to befriend her but Glynnis must choose between being unpopular also or making the right moves to become one of the popular crowd. There also is an unraveling story of why the parents moved to America and why the mother is so embittered.

#14 The Boy in Zaquitos by Bruce McAllister - A man gives a talk to a class about how he used to work for the government spreading deadly diseases in other countries. Strange.

#15 - Dimension by Alice Munro - skipped. This was an Andrea Yates type of story, only the father was the murderer, and that's not a spoiler.
#16 - The Bris by Eileen Pollack - skipped. A dying parent story.

#17 - St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell. This is one of my favourite stories in the collection. Young werewolves are sent to the 'Home' to be raised by nuns and taught to behave like their human side and forget their wolf side.

#18 - Horeseman by Richard Russo - A University professor grapples with what her life has become over what she could have become.

#19 - Sans Farine by Jim Shepard - This concerns the man who was the executioner at the time of the French Revolution. The men in his family had been executioners for seven generations, only now he is facing problems as his wife does not agree with the royal executions. Just ok.

#20 - Do Something by Kate Walbert - Basically this was just a depressing story of a woman whose son died of leukemia and she has turned to making protest demonstrations on her own.

The Red Passport by Katherine Shonk

This week, I read a stunning short story collection: Katherine Shonk’s The Red Passport. All eight stories are set in the post-Soviet Union, the majority in Russia, but one in Ukraine. The stories themselves all feature an intersection between Americans and Russians/Ukrainians, but the view points differ. Shonk spent a year in Moscow in 1995, and her familiarity with the culture shows. I felt as if I was back there much of the time, and when I finished the book I was left with a deep longing for Krasnodar and my host family there. While I enjoyed all the stories, my favourites were “Our American,” “My Mother’s Garden,” and “Honey Month.”

In “Our American,” thirteen-year-old Ilya is trying to figure out why his brother Sasha, just home from the Chechen war, has changed so much. Then a young American-Amy-moves in next door; it turns out she has Russian heritage and has a year-long job with a collective farm outside Moscow. Sasha begins working as Amy’s driver, and soon Sasha, Ilya, and Amy have become close friends. But when this close friendship leads to dangerous dreams, things get out of hand. I love how Amy’s introduced:

That evening, as they finished dinner on their balcony, the American girl burst onto Elmira Petrovna’s, the sude hood of a forest-green dublyonka coat shrouding her face. She stood sniffling and blowing her nose. When Sasha coughed, she whirled around and lowered her hood. Her pink nose and cheeks emerged as if from a pool of water, the sun’s last years flaring in her dark curls. “Hi,” she said, burshing dampness from her lashes. “I’m Amy.”

Shonk is so good at showing the fundamental differences between Americans and Russians, it’s so impressive!

“My Mother’s Garden” takes place in Ukraine, in an area of extreme radiation contamination. The main character is a grown woman, with a twelve-year-old daughter and a very stubborn mother. The mother’s moved back to their home village, despite the levels of radiation, which spurs most of the conflict. The main character hates having to go back to sucha toxic place, but doesn’t want to leave her mother alone. On the other hand, she categorically forbids her daughter from coming with her, despite her mother’s incessant pleas to see her granddaughter. Americans barely play a role in this story, although this is an American scientist, which is an interesting exploration of the effects on regular people of Chernobyl.

Finally, the last story in the collection is “Honey Month.” The main character is Rachel, an American who has been living in Moscow for the last year with Jack her boyfriend/fiance who’s conducting research there. They’ve planned a honeymoon to Prague, and yet circumstances make Rachel wonder about her relationship. If I say much more, I’ll give away most of the story; but I connected most with Rachel and her very human insecurities out of all of the collection.

Yegor’s eyes narrowed. “What are you, American?”
Did she really say “Da” with an accent? Or did her assitance betray uniquely American luxuries-an excess of time and naivete? Jack would be mortified if he were here, she thought, and for the first time she felt glad he wasn’t. “Da,” she sighed.

I highly recommend this collection, both for those interested in modern Russian, and those interested in how people confront change.

John Mutford's 4th Short Story Pick- Kate Sutherland's "Cool"

(Cross posted at The Book Mine Set)

Kate Sutherland, the brains behind both the short story discussion blog A Curious Singularity and the Short Story Reading Challenge, already had my respect for championing this underrated form. Turns out (thankfully) that she's also quite skilled.

I chose "Cool," because it concerned dancing and my daughter had her very first ballet class recently. She shuffled about on her toes like a nervous faun, but man, was she cute.

The girls in "Cool" are not, however, four years old. And thanks in part to books like A Complicated Kindness and lullabies for little criminals, the myth of the innocent girl has long been eradicated.

Sutherland takes a slightly different approach. While also starting at the cusp of change (right up front you know this will be a coming of age story), she focuses on what otherwise might be a peripheral character.

"Everything started the day Eva walked into Miss Waverly’s School of Dance."

But this is not about Eva. I love when authors are able to pull this off. Sometimes I find that authors try too hard to approach a story from an unexpected perspective (John Bemrose's The Island Walkers comes to mind). Fortunately Sutherland seemed to know to keep Eva, who'd perhaps be the more obvious choice, close.

And that is perhaps the crux of the story: choices. What defines coming-of-age but having to make difficult choices, and hopefully learning from them? Just as Eva would have been the easier choice for Sutherland, she was the easier choice for Beth (the narrator) to follow-- she was, afterall, the cool one. But, as we all know, the easiest, and more obvious choice is not always the best. Sutherland seemed to know that from the get go, Beth learns as the story goes on.

I have but one small complaint: the very last sentence. It seems too much of a summary to please me, too much of a declaration of what I, the reader, should have taken from the story. Granted, it was accurate, just unnecessary and I think the conclusion would have been stronger without it.

Soundtrack:
1. Girls Just Want To Have Fun- Cyndi Lauper
2. Safety Dance- Men Without Hats
3. Devil Inside- INXS
4. Someone Who's Cool- The Odds
5. It's Cool To Love Your Family- Feist