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ashyoung555's review against another edition
5.0
So this book was first published in 2002, the year I turned 8. Obviously, I'd never heard of it before when I plucked it out of the hundreds of donated books on a table in the middle of the Lifeline Bookfest a few years ago. But it caught my attention immediately. The title, for starters. I have a morbid obsession with crime stories and shows like Law & Order: SVU, but also with the moral and feminist question: why is society, collectively, so obsessed with dead girls, tortured girls, raped girls, sad girls, victimised girls, hurting girls, and how problematic is that?
This book doesn't really answer those questions, because that is not its purpose, but it does raise them. Each story follows different women. An unnamed "you" in the first story is a woman called up for jury duty for the serial killer case that threads each story together. The story is not about the case, but about this woman's relationship with her herself, the man she meets at court, the man who works for the Associated Press, and the world she is living in.
The second story is about Sally, a woman whose father is dying, told in parts assigned to parts of her body (eyes, lungs, feet, etc). She sees the story of the dead girls on the news in her father's hospital room.
The third story is about teenaged Jess, hanging out with two boys her age, Kyle and Joey. This story was unsettling, due to how the boys treat her, how real and lived that situation is. I think this part says a lot about the story, and the book itself, better than I could in my own words:
Jess listens to the names of some of the girls whose bodies have been found - sweet names like Tricia and Carly and Lianne. None of them are named Jessica. The reporter, a clean-cut man with dark brown skin and a long name that Jess can't pronounce, explains the excavation process, how the remaining mud and dirt is being moved away carefully, by hand. He clears his throat before announcing that forensic examinations of recovered skeletons have revealed that some of the girls were buried alive in groupings with other, already decomposing, bodies.
"Cool," Joey says. He turns the volume up.
Nothing encapsulates the feeling better, really, of how, as women, we watch these stories unfold. How I tell my younger sister that I caution her when she goes out, not because I don't trust her, but because I don't want her to become a girl on the news. Yet to a lot of people, especially men, it is just a morbid fascination, a cool story on the TV. Society as a whole remains detached from and dismissive of such stories, except for the few times the media latches onto the "perfect" victim that a whole country will mourn for. Apart from those few times, women-as-victims is par for the course, just an accepted risk of being born into the body and the life that you are.
But moving on to the fourth story, about another unnamed "you", a mother whose troubled adult daughter is missing again. This mother is obsessed with the story of the dead girls, tapes the evening news so she doesn't miss a moment. Through this, we learn a little more about the case, delve deeper into the community the characters in these stories lives in.
The fifth story tells the story of two friends on late night drive away from their problems. One woman, divorced and recently dealing with the death of their new puppy, the other thinking that her boyfriend is about to break up with her. They are messy and crass and unlikable, falling apart together in ways women often aren't given room to do. They end up outside the prison where our serial killer is being held.
The sixth story introduces us to a nurse, addicted to various different substances, attending a high school dance-a-thon as a favour to her neighbour. Parents in the stands around her are talking about the serial killer, a dentist. She is losing her grip. Again, she is given room to be unlikable but still attract empathy.
The seventh story is my favourite. It is about a man named Rollie and a woman named Adele who, at the beginning of the story, encounters our serial killer out on the prowl, but gets away unscathed. She is homeless at the time she finds Rollie's tattoo shop, and their relationship is full of miscommunication and tenderness and my God, I love this story. I love how Rollie's insecurities are bared, how Adele is so rough around the edges, how their life begins. The story is perfect and nuanced and real.
The eighth and final story is about two teenaged sisters, Grace and Nita. There is no explicit mention of the serial killer in this story, but it is hidden everywhere throughout. Grace and Nita's relationship is full of love and hate and jealousy, but a tenderness and familial connection that runs beneath it all. It made me think of my own tumultuous relationship with my sister, how easy it is to hate one moment, but know you'd still do anything for her in the end.
What this collection does is centre women, instead of the killer or the detective (i.e. knight in shining armour, man there to save the day to counteract and cover up the heinous things more men have done in the story), in the kind of story where women are dying but men are most often the focal point.
These stories have a lot to say about how women are treated by men, how women are treated by women, how men are treated by men, how teenagers become adults, how messy life is, how complicated people are, how complicated women are, but not in the same ways of the "crazy girlfriend" trope. No, this books shows women as complicated in full, real ways that have nothing to do with how men perceive them.
This is a book of messy, complicated, morally-ambiguous women, and the dead girls they're thinking about. They're all treated with compassion and respect in each story, realised beyond caricatures into fully formed people. The prose is wonderful and the use of different perspectives to influence how readers experience each woman's story is very effective. Similar to the stories in Her Body and Other Parties, this book has all of the themes and subject matter that makes me, figuratively, drool. I adored it.
This book doesn't really answer those questions, because that is not its purpose, but it does raise them. Each story follows different women. An unnamed "you" in the first story is a woman called up for jury duty for the serial killer case that threads each story together. The story is not about the case, but about this woman's relationship with her herself, the man she meets at court, the man who works for the Associated Press, and the world she is living in.
The second story is about Sally, a woman whose father is dying, told in parts assigned to parts of her body (eyes, lungs, feet, etc). She sees the story of the dead girls on the news in her father's hospital room.
The third story is about teenaged Jess, hanging out with two boys her age, Kyle and Joey. This story was unsettling, due to how the boys treat her, how real and lived that situation is. I think this part says a lot about the story, and the book itself, better than I could in my own words:
Jess listens to the names of some of the girls whose bodies have been found - sweet names like Tricia and Carly and Lianne. None of them are named Jessica. The reporter, a clean-cut man with dark brown skin and a long name that Jess can't pronounce, explains the excavation process, how the remaining mud and dirt is being moved away carefully, by hand. He clears his throat before announcing that forensic examinations of recovered skeletons have revealed that some of the girls were buried alive in groupings with other, already decomposing, bodies.
"Cool," Joey says. He turns the volume up.
Nothing encapsulates the feeling better, really, of how, as women, we watch these stories unfold. How I tell my younger sister that I caution her when she goes out, not because I don't trust her, but because I don't want her to become a girl on the news. Yet to a lot of people, especially men, it is just a morbid fascination, a cool story on the TV. Society as a whole remains detached from and dismissive of such stories, except for the few times the media latches onto the "perfect" victim that a whole country will mourn for. Apart from those few times, women-as-victims is par for the course, just an accepted risk of being born into the body and the life that you are.
But moving on to the fourth story, about another unnamed "you", a mother whose troubled adult daughter is missing again. This mother is obsessed with the story of the dead girls, tapes the evening news so she doesn't miss a moment. Through this, we learn a little more about the case, delve deeper into the community the characters in these stories lives in.
The fifth story tells the story of two friends on late night drive away from their problems. One woman, divorced and recently dealing with the death of their new puppy, the other thinking that her boyfriend is about to break up with her. They are messy and crass and unlikable, falling apart together in ways women often aren't given room to do. They end up outside the prison where our serial killer is being held.
The sixth story introduces us to a nurse, addicted to various different substances, attending a high school dance-a-thon as a favour to her neighbour. Parents in the stands around her are talking about the serial killer, a dentist. She is losing her grip. Again, she is given room to be unlikable but still attract empathy.
The seventh story is my favourite. It is about a man named Rollie and a woman named Adele who, at the beginning of the story, encounters our serial killer out on the prowl, but gets away unscathed. She is homeless at the time she finds Rollie's tattoo shop, and their relationship is full of miscommunication and tenderness and my God, I love this story. I love how Rollie's insecurities are bared, how Adele is so rough around the edges, how their life begins. The story is perfect and nuanced and real.
The eighth and final story is about two teenaged sisters, Grace and Nita. There is no explicit mention of the serial killer in this story, but it is hidden everywhere throughout. Grace and Nita's relationship is full of love and hate and jealousy, but a tenderness and familial connection that runs beneath it all. It made me think of my own tumultuous relationship with my sister, how easy it is to hate one moment, but know you'd still do anything for her in the end.
What this collection does is centre women, instead of the killer or the detective (i.e. knight in shining armour, man there to save the day to counteract and cover up the heinous things more men have done in the story), in the kind of story where women are dying but men are most often the focal point.
These stories have a lot to say about how women are treated by men, how women are treated by women, how men are treated by men, how teenagers become adults, how messy life is, how complicated people are, how complicated women are, but not in the same ways of the "crazy girlfriend" trope. No, this books shows women as complicated in full, real ways that have nothing to do with how men perceive them.
This is a book of messy, complicated, morally-ambiguous women, and the dead girls they're thinking about. They're all treated with compassion and respect in each story, realised beyond caricatures into fully formed people. The prose is wonderful and the use of different perspectives to influence how readers experience each woman's story is very effective. Similar to the stories in Her Body and Other Parties, this book has all of the themes and subject matter that makes me, figuratively, drool. I adored it.
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