From Library Journal
Erian has published in hip, commendable places like Zoetrope and Nerve, but this is her first collection. It's a work one reads and likes despite oneself, because the characters can make one frown. There's Beatrice, who tries to make her grades in school by seducing her professors while rather meanly rejecting the advances of a lovelorn freshman, and newly married Shayna, who could never get through her famous father-in-law's books but falls for him anyway. Erian has a way of creating situations that make one read compulsively, like a guilty pleasure. She's good at capturing the dark and sensual underside of life without either celebrating it, or judging it, or presenting it with deadpan cynicism. She cares, and it comes across. A good choice for public libraries, especially with younger readers who deserve someone voicing their concerns. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
"I did it against my better judgment" is an old saying usually accompanied by a rueful shake of the head. The characters in Erian's short stories seem possessed of less-than-better judgment well seasoned with rue, acting out signals from a shadowy part of the psyche coordinating with a peculiarly complicated portion of the heart. A new bride finds herself strongly attracted to her father-in-law. Joyce and her brother Farrell bemoan their mother's obsessive need to meddle in strangers' lives, only to see themselves outbidding her in an effort to do the same. Vanessa, who dislikes wearing clothes, torments her modest sister with her nudity as an adolescent, then in college takes up with a superconservative Egyptian exchange student who's distressed at most of her clothes, sorting her closet into two categories: things she should and should not wear. He abandons her (wearing a forbidden bikini) in a lake, but, paradoxically, she marries him. Isn't it funny how those who make us shake our heads can be oddly endearing?
Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
