I first heard about Amy Jones from a review of What Boys Like in The Globe and Mail. Critic James Bartley wrote: "Amy Jones excels at the prose of invisible labour. In the best of this debut collection, her writing reads like understanding – as if there's no gap between the words and what they make you perceive. The top 10 of these 15 tales would make a book that is close to perfect." Seeing as Globe reviewers hardly ever hand out this sort of praise, I figured the book would be worth a read.
All Jones' stories feature protagonists who are social misfits: drunken teenagers, sex-crazed deadbeats, young alcoholic moms on welfare and siblings of runaways to name a few. Though I couldn't really identify with most of her characters, Jones does create tight, cutting and darkly humourous dialogue that makes the stories punchy and immediate.
Unfortunately, I found the opening story, "A Good Girl," irritating and melodramatic but the collection also contains some gems: "Where You Are," for example, blurs the line between what is and what might have been and forces the reader to appreciate the present.
No comments:
Post a Comment