A review by sidebraid
The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

3.0

This book was a pleasant surprise for me. I wasn't expecting very good writing, and Bank's stories were more accomplished than I'd anticipated. Some of the stories, particularly the early ones ("Advanced Beginners" and "The Floating House"), were well worth my time. I especially liked Bank's decision to preface her chapters with topical yet screwball epigraphs taken from various guides and manuals--epigraphs like, "While home is the place where you can relax and be yourself, this doesn't mean that you can take advantage of the love and affection other members of your family have for you" ("20th Century Typewriting"). As an adolescent in Boater's Safety class, I once heard an instructor advise us to mentally picture ourselves in the crisis scenarios in our textbooks in order to prepare ourselves for acting appropriately in real life crises. Bank's stories read like the transcripts of such mental imagining as applied to romance, while also lampooning the luscious dysfunctionality hidden in all guides and manuals and demonstrating the limits of the didactic.