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A SPECTACULAR FAILURE AT 13
[Sally Maulden] is convinced that she's not up to the task of negotiating her world, and what's appealing about her is her feisty determination to fail with flair, to take control of the outsider status that's thrust upon her. We feel her pain, her minor and recurring emotional apocalypses, and appreciate her flatly scathing wit. The novel is filled with convincingly adolescent perceptions. ''Soda fountains with mirrors,'' Sally tells us, ''were probably put in drugstores so when you looked at yourself having a soda, you'd get up and buy a bunch of cosmetics or drugs.'' She hears her beloved ''saying my name in a way I recorded to play inside my head forever.'' And she endures a visit from her parents in which they talk to one another ''like royalty on television.'' In the end we have some trouble adequately separating the narrator's sweetly romantic nostalgia from the author's, so not enough of the celebration seems earned. But ultimately ''The Queen of October'' is Sally's novel, and Sally wins us over: the Sally who puts peanuts in her Coke and lets them fizz and sucks the foam, the Sally who gives us chapter headings like ''I Am an Object of Desire,'' the Sally who believes that ''if somebody happened to be admiring the person he was married to, you shouldn't mess with it'' - the Sally who overcomes and elevates a coming-of-age story she never said was so unusual. A DOSE OF HIS OWN MEDICINE ''Oh good heavens!'' My grandmother stood up and looked at him as though he had just stripped naked. ''What are you doing?'' ''I'm going to need this after this lunch.'' She moved close to him and pshawed with such guttural participation that I thought she was sick. ''Horace!'' She leaned over him and breathed fire. ''You know you're not supposed to be doing anything with that medicine.''
Book Review
Best American short stories 2017
Presents a selection of the best works of short fiction of the past year from a variety of acclaimed sources.
BOOK
SHE WOULD HAVE BEEN BEAUTIFUL
Throughout there are small details of tenderness and suffering: the mechanics of undressing and changing a feverish 11-year-old so that she won't remember being lifted out of bed; a mother saving reprimands in the hope they'll count for more when finally used; the dying child's reacting, with heartbreaking matter-of-factness, to her brother's involuntary recoil at her touch (''You can't catch it from touching me or anything like that''). [Polly] watches her daughter running outside ''so quickly you'd think she was weightless, you'd think she was flying straight into the sun.'' [Charlie], abandoned by his best friend, who has been forbidden to see him anymore, waits outside all the time, keeping an eye on the empty street. [Amanda], with her braces finally off, is full of happiness, because now she knows that ''she would have been beautiful.'' Yet such is Ms. [Alice Hoffman]'s tenderness and perceptiveness that we come to care about her creations despite their imperfections the way we would care about those we love despite theirs. We're introduced to part of the nightmare. We're made to feel, as the doctor treating Amanda puts it, ''the indiscriminate order of cruelty'' in ''the random path of a virus.'' At one point, a friend of the family who has kept her son away from Charlie tells Polly during a chance meeting at the supermarket that this breaks her heart. '' 'No!' Polly tells her. 'It makes you uncomfortable. It breaks my heart.' '' It's the gift and the achievement of ''At Risk'' that it carries us across that line - from the uncomfortable to the heartbreaking.
Book Review