My Top 15 in 2010

2010 was a pretty good reading year. Strangely, I didn’t seem to review many of the books that delighted me most. I read a ton of books about British women in various types of confinement. Maybe that certain type of dry escapism is what I needed to carry me through my semesters and various infirmities. Two of my favorites were published in 2010: Meeks and Love in Infant Monkeys. Eleven were by ladies. Three were comics. And, with that riveting introduction, here is the list:

Meeks by Julia Holmes
This first novel was a weird surprise. At first I wasn’t sure that I was into it, this book about men with extremely limited options in life, for whom marriage is the ultimate goal, but then I got completely sucked in. Something about Holmes’ details, and the way that the broader story emerges from three characters’ points of view, makes reading this like unfolding a secret message prepared by an origami master—getting to the answer is half the fun.

The book’s design, with its French flaps and lovely cover art by Robyn O’Neil, should also get a shout out. It looks so unusual and compelling that even though I’ve already read it, I keep wanting to pick it up again for the first time.

Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
This is a re-re-read. It’s a lovely meditation on old age and death done by a master.

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey


Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
How, why, did I not write about this British gem when it was fresh in my mind? This was a nasty little book about the horribleness of family and the loneliness that withheld wealth can bring. A huge flood in a small village is central to the plot and Comyns writes beautiful, gory details of rotting, waterlogged nature like no other. Calm yet precise, I loved this book!

Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
I will admit it here—I have never read any Moomin books. However, Tove Jansson wasn’t a one-comic pony, she wrote in many forms, including novels. This book is a quiet, hypnotic book about time, family and small worlds. I loved it.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

The City and the City by China Mieville
A mystery in a divided city, this book was a total treat. Mieville’s usually florid writing is reined in here and it really works. Though the setting, two distinct cities existing in the same geographical area, with the possibility of a third emerging, seems like it could have turned into a blow-me-down political allegory or an exposition nightmare, the author’s character work holds its own. Check it out!

This year I also read Looking for Jake, an uneven collection of Mieville’s short stories. It was interesting to see how The City and the City could have developed from ideas he explored much earlier in a story about feral streets called "Reports of Certain Events in London." In The Scar, which I also read this year, the idea of a living, moving city was taken to extremes. The story was quite different from TCATC, and those with no patience for Mieville’s wordy style would not enjoy it. I read it at the perfect time however—in a sickbed—and was transported.

Norwood by Charles Portis & Amulet by Robert Bolano
Both of these books were gifts from The Prog Lady. I was concerned that her love of old man stories would have clouded her judgment, but both short books were excellent in different ways. Norwood was funny and deceptively simple. Amulet had an amazing main character, a jailed woman who considered herself the “Mother of Mexican Poetry” and a looping pace that challenges ideas of memory and truth.

Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Davis
This book of short stories totally rocked. They each have a central animal presence, but are fully about human inadequacies and excess. And the book was a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction runner up if that means anything to you.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
Being middle-aged and female sucketh, as this book of malignant benignity shows. So, sometimes you need to become a witch.
The usually excellent introductory essays furnished by the New York Review of Books were not represented here. Alison Lurie’s intro was superficial, boring and gives away the entire plot of the story. Read it after you’ve finished the novel, if you must.

Monsters by Ken Dahl
A curious mix of sex ed and autobio, Dahl’s big book on herpes illuminates life with an unpopular disease. The self-loathing infused self-portraits fill the pages alongside facts about herpes and several painful anecdotes about self treatment and relationships after the herp. His hideous visualizations of his body were my favorite part. If only I could express my internal hatred so beautifully! Of course, things straighten out for him in the end, but it is an interesting path to what feels more like a compromise than peace.

Cross Country by MK Reed
I initially picked up the single issues of Cross Country and was super bummed when I found out that there wasn’t going to be a final chapter released. So it took me awhile to pick up the trade but I am really happy I did. Reed’s writing shines here and though the art looks a bit labored, the story of a work-related road trip works really well.

Down the Street by Lynda Barry
Before Marlys and her pals, there was Down the Street, where puffy-haired ancestors of the alternative press darlings played in sadder stories. It’s not quite as smooth and universal as Barry’s later work but it’s a great, instructive read nonetheless.

Books of 2010

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Meeks by Julia Holmes
The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry
Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer
Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction, Edited by Sabrina Chapadjiev
Zero History by William Gibson
Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel
Bookhunter by Jason Shiga
Hound by Vincent McCaffery
Amulet by Roberto Bolano
The Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss
The Scar by China Mieville
Momento Mori by Muriel Spark
Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey
Monsters by Ken Dahl
Rainforest by Jenny Diski
Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks
Absence Makes the Heart by Lynne Tillman
The Salon by Nick Bertozzi
Looking for Jake by China Mielville
Cross Country by MK Reed
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
King Rat by China Mieville
Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin
Artichoke Tales by Megan Kelso
Summer Will Show by by Syliva Townsend Warner
A Mess of Everything by Miss Lasko-Gross
Whirlwind Wonderland by Rina Ayuyang
Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton
Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
Exit Wounds by Rutu Mondan
Cast in Doubt by Lynne Tillman
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. Mc Hugh
Paper Cities, An Anthology of Urban Fantasy Edited by Ekaterina Sedia
Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology by James Patrick Kelly & John Kessel, eds.
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
The City and the City by China Mieville
The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti
Sweet Tomb by Trinie Dalton
Norwood by Charles Portis
Down the Street by Lynda Barry
Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Davis
Lolly Willowes by Syliva Townsend Warner

The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry

Fleshy characters are all I desire when I need distraction. I want heavy adjectives that knock wetly against my head as I wade through a book. I want a book that sprawls in interesting ways and, even if it’s a fantasy, feels “real.”

So, perhaps I’m just not in the headspace to enjoy Berry’s noirish mistaken identity mystery. Set in a no-name city, the story follows Charles Unwin, a clerk in a monolithic detective agency called simply the Agency who files cases for a star detective. When the detective goes missing and Unwin is suddenly promoted, he decides to investigate his former detective’s disappearance. Pretty standard stuff this is, and though it gets wrapped in layers of fantastic happenings including mass dreaming and giant archivists, the story can’t survive on plot alone.

All we really get of each character is a tic (Unwin won’t relinquish his hat, his secretary is a narcoleptic, a security guard important to the case can’t remember anything) with a few bits of back-story stuck to it. This does not inspire involvement with Unwin, the missing detective or any of the other major characters, so it is quite difficult to stay engaged with the quest or to feel any urgency to return Unwin to his former, dull occupation and life. It doesn’t help that Berry’s dialogue channels the output of an untalented 40s screenwriter, as in this exchange:
“Detective Sivart?” he said.
“Yeah, Charlie,” said the boy.
“I can’t remember the name of this game.”
“It’s an old game,” said the boy. “Older than chess. Older than curse words and shoeshine. Doesn’t matter what you call it, so long as you know how to play. Everyone’s in on it, except one guy, and that guy’s ‘it.’ Okay?”
“Detective Sivart?”
“Yeah, Charlie.”
“I’m ‘it,’ aren’t I?”
“And quick too,” the boy said.

Much of the sense of fun that Berry tries to inject into the book with wacky scenarios is smashed flat by the overwhelming gray of the story. It rains everyday, places and people are described with affectless names, the intimation of oppressive by hints of labyrinth rules of the Agency—I get it, I get it—world building happening here! But without a little red blood, I don’t care.

China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh

I’ve avoided writing about this book until now for reasons unknown to me, and now, after it has been renewed six times from the library, I think it is time to give it back so someone else can have a chance to read it.

In China Mountain Zhang, China has won the cold war and Chinese communism has spread the globe. In the 22nd century, the U.S. has had only a few generations since the bloody American Liberation War. Our titular main character Zhang was born to two revolutionaries in the aftermath. Though he is ethnically only half-Chinese, his parents have him genetically altered to look fully so, both as a tribute to what they believed and with hope of Zhang having a better life in a Chinese-run world. Even his name, that of a now-disgraced hero, reeks of the optimism of his parents. Despite this, he works as a construction tech in NYC—a dead end job—and spends his time off watching kite races, drinking and being unhappily gay in a society that does not tolerate homosexuality. In China, the land of opportunity, gayness is even more forbidden, but despite this, it is Zhang's hope to go there someday and do, well do something better than being a tech.

Wow, perhaps I hate writing plot summary so much is because I am so bad at it.

Our man China Mountain Zhang does get to go to China, after some plot twists that only strain credulity a bit. His end is a little too sweet for me. It feels like McHugh loved her creation so much that she didn’t want to see him permanently hurt. Even with the rosy sunset ending, I loved this book.

Two things really stuck out for me. In the China part of the book, Zhang meets a guy he is attracted to. He ignores it because, hey, who wants to get sent to jail? Then the guy begins speaking in a code that Zhang recognizes from pick ups in NYC and can’t believe his ears. The dated cheesiness of the exchange (like the 80s channeling the 1910s) worked in its favor because it got me thinking about the languages we create to survive in oppressive societies and how the internet is making that less possible and less needed at the same time.

Another was the mostly untold story of Zhang’s parents and other minor characters in the book. Those that help “reform” the U.S. in an effort called Cleansing Winds are now considered embarrassments and those that haven’t been killed or sent to camps keep quiet about their part. This has always been a compelling issue for me in the history of and literature about Communism and it was interesting to see it explored in this McHugh’s world.

*Despite the giant gun-looking thing, there is no interstellar combat in China Mountain Zhang. It's an ice melter!

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey

It's dreary here in Brooklyn, and if I hadn’t already, it would be a perfect day to read Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. Perfect because it is set on a galing day in England, which reminds one how much worse it could be, and because it is a brisk little book filled with ridiculous characters that one is free to vigorously dislike.

I’ve been getting into these types of books recently. Often by forgotten women novelists, they provide a weird kind of escapism where I can revel in the details while indulging some misanthropy. Cheerful Weather was a gift from Amanda Well-Tailored. For precisely four B train rides into Manhattan, I was chuckling at the door of a freezing manor house instead of a stinky MTA car. Thanks, AWT!

The novella takes place on the titular wedding day of Dolly Thatcham and Owen, eight years apart. Dolly is getting wasted upstairs as the preparations go on around her, and her frequent nips from the rum bottle hidden in her voluminous dress lead inspire a kind of puttering melancholy that is fun to read about, especially if you’ve ever succumbed to such a mood yourself. The Thatcham home is filled with various family members being ridiculous, including my favorite character, chapped and puffy younger sister Kitty: “ ‘How are your lectures going?’ asked Kitty of Joseph, a kind of desperate intenseness in her voice and face. This was her style of the moment with the male sex.”

Leave the bizarre intro by Frances Partridge for after. Wouldn’t want Bloomsbury gossip and unhappy personal details to overshadow the story, would we?

The Salon by Nick Bertozzi

Last week, before work I went to the MoMA with Amanda Well-Tailored. Besides the awesomeness of doing anything in person with AWT, I was struck by how weirdly the wander through mimicked my reading of last night--Nick Bertozzi’s The Salon.

The Salon focuses on the French Modernist art movement and the expats than ran in it. Bertozzi gives each a distinct (and funny) personality and look. I especially like Gertrude Stein’s balls-out Mama Bear and her sniveling brother, Leo, and the bottomless bravado pit of Bertozzi’s Picasso. The writing is such that the story works as a historically-glossed superhero story or a meditation on creation, greed and desire. It is both, and compelled me to consider picking up some bios on these previously uninteresting art idols.

The group not only makes and collects art, but also parties together and have found a drug that allows one to enter paintings—a seductive idea for this group. Unfortunately they are not the only ones drinking the blue stuff; an artist-murderer is pulling the heads off of Modernists and leaving their bodies with a tell-tale splash of blue. The mystery is a fun way to navigate the salons and backstreets of Paris. The art feels fluid and alive, perfectly conveying the vibrant world of paintings, in and out.

Though I had heard great things about the book from several outlets, but after reading the dismal Stuffed! last year, and seeing Bertozzi’s merely adequate art, I was a bit skeptical. I am so glad my library had a copy so I could try it. I am looking forward to checking out more work that he’s written and drawn.

*In additional The Salon news: the sad story of how Free Comic Book Day + Picasso's penis equaled big trouble for retailer Gordon Lee.

Cast In Doubt by Lynne Tillman

Right now I am reading Absence Makes the Heart, a short story collection by Lynne Tillman. It’s really great so far and brings into perspective what I find compelling about Tillman’s work: She crawls inside of fictional people and seems to channel her first person characters. You forget that you are reading the work of an author. The main characters of the books I’ve read so far are experts of some kind, which shapes the kind of self-talk done by the characters.

In Cast In Doubt the protagonist is a seventy-something American expat named Horace living in a small town in Greece. He becomes obsessed with a young American woman, Ruth, who rents a rotting house across from him. He ruminates on his interactions with her, obsessed with his obsession, weaving in and out of memories of his past and observations of his present. He is also writing a book about his ancestors that is just not getting done, whereas ideas for his moneymaking project, a detective series, just keep popping up. I like Horace best when he is being catty about others in clever ways, just like a good elder-gay should.

Horace’s voice is strong and his history is rock solid—when he laments the repressed yet sexually charged forties you do too, even if it is with a little eye roll for the psychic indulgences of a privileged old man. And when the story gets turned about a bit there is shock and questions. Mostly Cast In Doubt made me want to drink gallons of the cold white wine so sensually described by Horace.

I liked the book, but feel a tepidness towards it, most likely because I cared less for Horace than I did for American Genius’s skin-obsessed inmate.

*No picture because I returned this ages ago. No library jail for me!

Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

What if a story about a Victorian lady dropped all that does-he-love-her jibber jabber and took our rulebound heroine from walking her grounds, recreating her own childhood, to her children (“They had sloping shoulders, both of them.”) and their blistering, raving deaths from small pox to gay Paris, literally and matter-of-factly.Well, then that book would be this:



Precisely written and a bit autobiographical (according to the introduction by Warner’s biographer Claire Harman), Summer Will Show is a political novel, a love story and actually quite funny. The main character, Sophia Willoughby, after finding out that her decorative but none too useful husband Frederick has hooked up with a wild woman in Paris, must then decide how she is going to live the rest of her life. Will she take to books or embroidery or maybe hump around a bit herself? In the end she decides to go to France to confront Frederick and ends up in the infuriating situation of having to reconcile with someone much less interesting than Minna, the woman he left her for.

So, Sophia falls in love.

Some of the Parisian parts drag a bit with Sophia’s observations of Minna’s revolution-obsessed life, but it is well worth the trip. Between this and the even more fun Lolly Willows, I can’t wait to read some more Warner.

An aside: Though it was written well after Queen Victoria left the throne, there are some exoticizing/straight-up racist thoughts thunk by Sophia about Minna and others are interesting with respect to how bigotry sounds today.

Wide Eyed by Trinie Dalton

This is what summer feels like. Hot, sticky, a little raw, the stories in Wide Eyed, are first person West Coast tales—20-something wandering lit with rocknroll and a little bit of magic thrown in. The cover, by Dalton as well, tells you something about the inside:

If you read these stories all in a row, you might feel like you are experiencing several late nights in the same woman’s life: the boyfriend is always named Matt, animals are always important and L.A. is where it’s at or where it’s been. The woman is searching for a remedy for the things that aren’t right: In ‘Hummingbird Moonshine’ it’s a series of physical hurts, in ‘The Tide of My Mounting Sympathy’ it’s a lurking mentally ill sort-of friend. Even the structure of some stories recall list making or the organizing power of prayer by presenting thoughts on a top in several numbered parts. ‘Faces’ is the best of these; most of the others, though enjoyable, feel underdone.

My favorite story, ‘Animal Story,’ contains several talismans against loneliness. The main character is out in the desert, alone, her cat having been eaten by a coyote, and she is deciding how and when to rejoining society. In the meantime, she hosts parties for spiders and ants and plays Nintendo:

“Playing Burgertime gives you this false sense of staying busy, as if you are personally responsible for delivering meat to mankind. Staving off starvation of the masses is an overwhelming task that requires total dedication. Catching the stuff on the bun takes on religious significance, as if it’s manna flowing from heaven. Don’t fuck up and drop the lettuce crooked on the burger or it will drift off the cliff beside you. As you read this you think, Who cares about Burgertime? But when you are awake all night because it’s too quiet and there’s no cat the wiggle your foot on, your deluded brain mistakes the Chef’s duties for your own. You’ll be making burgers all night sometime—just watch.”

Most of these stories are sneaky like that. Yes, Marc Bolan, Freddy Krueger and unicorns make appearances, but Dalton doesn’t use them as emotional shortcuts. Many of the stories include dreams and memories, who better to guide us through than the figures that create and inhabit those spaces?

Cecil and Jordan in New York: Stories by Gabrielle Bell

“But then, I’ve never felt so useful.”

The title story of this collection, first published in Kramer’s Ergot 5, is one of my favorite comic stories. Cutting sharp-eyed realism with fantasy, it showcases the unique cruelty that New York dishes out to newcomers, as well as the wearing effect romantic relationships can have on their participants. Bell has a keen ear for dialog in her fictional stories and here it serves to give us just enough back story to make the main character, Cecil, situation heartbreaking. The story is also in vibrant color and this adds a nice liveliness to the story.

The rest of the book is a mix of fiction and autobio stories with main characters that are like Cecil—underappreciated and harassed by life. However, none of the rest of the stories resonate with me. An overwhelming bleakness pervades much of Bell’s work, including this collection. Although I love the way she draws and her ability to tease out a telling detail I don’t enjoy spending time with her characters. The desire to give them all a violent shake is too distracting!

*photo from drawn & quarterly because I already returned this to the library

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan

I loved the colors of Exit Wounds. All that red contrasted with muted Ikea colors really suctioned my eye to the page.

The story--a man, Koby, is contacted by a young woman, Numi, who claims his absent father was killed in a cafeteria bombing and convinces him to go on a reluctant journey to find the truth—had its weaknesses, especially in the character development and plotting areas, but it moved along swiftly and I kept wanting to know what happened next.

For an outsider, Exit Wounds gave some insight into Jewish life in Israel through characters’ casual conversation. There is a running gag throughout the book about bombings—where the Hadera bombing that that two are investigating keeps getting confused with a larger one in a town called Haifa-- that shows the way a culture accommodates regular, extreme, violence into everyday life by becoming matter-a-fact about it. We also peek into the food, topography and customs of Israel, including a very unusual scene, to my American sensibilities, in which a man identifies his father, a bombing victim, by his ears over CC tv, then requests a video of the body for his mother.

Sometimes Modan’s detailing of faces in Exit Wounds veers towards cartoon-y, which undermines the character work she does, especially with the women in Numi’s family. This jars with the serious tone of the work and pulled me right out of the story in some cases.

I borrowed Exit Wounds from the library, and based on it, would check out more of Modan’s work in the same way.

*photo from drawn & quarterly

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

Reading A Complicated Kindness reminded me a lot of reading Geek Love for the first time. It is fast paced, strewn with pain and humor and told in a captivating first-person narrative that makes the form seem easy. Though not set in the freak show circuit like GL, ACK does follow life in, in the words of the 16-year-old narrator Nomi, a “secret town” of Mennonites in Canada called East Village. She spends a lot of time considering her place in the Village, and the flow of her thoughts is very true: “That I belong in the frightful fresco of this man’s dream unnerves me. I wonder exactly happened in Menno’s world that made him turn his back on it…The mark of the beast? Streets paved in gold? What? Fuck off. I dream of escaping into the real world. If I’m forced to read one more Narnia series book I’ll kill myself.”


Nomi is angry, defeated, self-destructive, but mostly just sad. Both her sister and her mother have disappeared from town, leaving her with her good-hearted but befuddled father and a bad reputation. She has a plan to leave town too, like we all did at 16, and it is equally possible and fantasy. The main thing keeping her is her lovely dad, Ray, whose own depression at the loss of the other half of the family. I love the character of Ray; his unfunniness and Dadliness are dead-on renderings by Toews and his treatment shows the depth of her understanding of the heartbreak of living in both a faith bound society and in the world, the real world as Nomi would have it, at once when all you want to do is be a good person and have a good life.

The specter of excommunication, a concept that seems especially cruel to me, hovers over this story, and that is especially sinister since Nomi’s frothing uncle is the town’s religious head. As we learn more about the family’s history we can decide to see Uncle Hans as a damaged individual with a poor choice of coping mechanisms or just a complete asshole, or both. Hans shows well the unfortunate arc a life can take when a person chooses to transform an incidence of pain into a grudge against the world and how potent and scary that transformation can be in a religious context.

Women in East Village have it noticeably worse than the men and Toews engages this subtly. The fine line between being a child and being an adult is especially perilous in East Village, and I like that Toews exploits this by having Nomi left by her mysterious, vibrant mom at age thirteen (still a kid) and telling this angry, revelatory story as an outraged teen, near the age when her outrageous sister took off. Other women who can’t or won’t leave go sick like Nomi’s religious best friend, get drunk like her grandma or just go dead like her aunt, extreme reflections of the options available to women everywhere who can’t conform but can’t leave.

All this sounds depressing, but A Complicated Kindness is funny and vibrant too. Though she feels stuck, you know that something is happening with Nomi. All that teenage energy comes busting through the pages, and it is an inspiration and a warning at once.

The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

Last year I read the still-unreviewed book of short stories Animal Crackers by Hannah Tinti and enjoyed it overall. I bought The Good Thief at Unnameable Books the other day, fueled by vague remembrances of good reviews, a bookish companion and the ten bucks burning a hole in my pocket.

I started the book that night and got sucked in immediately. The story is about an orphan named Ren with five sticky fingers and a mysterious past. After years of lining up in front of a sinister statue of St. Anthony for prospective parents looking for a farmhand, a shop boy, or maybe even someone to love, and not being picked, he gets adopted by a man that claims to be his brother and seems especially convinced by Ren’s missing hand.

The Good Thief is an enjoyable ride marred only by Tinti’s protective love of her main character. Firstly, she occasionally imbues him with internal thoughts that a boy who’s rarely seen the outside of a Catholic monastery wall wouldn’t likely have. When he thinks of God, he pictures a “benignly neglectful garden, carefully snipping His roses,” a musing that seems too sophisticated and far from the Catholic indoctrination he received. When he imagines a real home he imagines a set of “good “ dishes, unconvincingly knowing such a thing exists, specifically “white porcelain” and a “small bowl of wildflowers, picked from behind the kitchen door, pink and blue with tiny yellow buttercups.” Apparently, Ren has a flair for fantasy interior design! The few passages like this tore me right out of the story and detracted from Tinti’s otherwise careful rendering of Ren by trying to give him delicateness that just translates into preciousness.

Additionally, as much as no one wants a one-handed orphan boy to suffer extra bad luck, real pain for Ren is necessary to make his story real. His journey is certainly not without pitfalls, but at each tense moment the reader knows that Ren will end up essentially okay through quick thinking, luck, or the mood swings of another character. The circumstance that is supposed to make the ending bittersweet doesn’t quite hit the reader where it hurts, because the blow is weighed down by the sack of coincidences that lead up to it.

Sweet Tomb by Trinie Dalton

Sunday night I babysat a much-missed blogger's baby. Or at least I think I did; she was asleep and made not a peep so I didn't even crack the door for fear of waking her up. Instead of using this block of time in a different home to rifle through my friends' things and judge them, I decided to read a book that the baby had apparently picked out.

Sweet Tooth is a tiny book of seven linked stories centering on a witch named Candy who lives in a pink city. She hates being a witch and can't decide if she should just kill herself, or bring all of her loved ones with her. I enjoyed the parts where she chronicles her attempts to be "non-witchy" as a girl and the perils of being a witch's daughter when you just want to have friends like you for you--not for all-you-can-eat candy.

Beyond her mother issues, older Candy has her fair share of bad relationships. The most steady is that with a vampire named Chad who loves her, but loves her blood best. Despite the handicap of poor social skills, long life and shitty lovers, Candy wants children on occasion but finds that, "Just because I can have fifty babies here within the hour...doesn't mean that I should or that I'll be a good mother." Considering that her own mother had stereotypical cravings, her reluctance is understandable. I like that even a with with magical baby-dispensing powers agonizes a bit about passing on the curse of witchery. For all the lemon drops and broomsticks, the anger of being born with burdensome and unpleasant traits and the subsequent fear of spreading them is a central theme in Sweet Tomb. It reminded me a lot of conversations I've had about mental illness in families.

The final two stories, "Killer Pair" and "Death Wish" are the most psychedelic of the group and the least interesting. Once Candy leaves the forest and her candy house for the city, not to return until she has achieved the lofty goal of "pain-free love in my heart and some healthy lust" she loses a bit of her magic.

Sweet Tomb would work well as young adult fiction in the vein of the Weetzie Bat stories. All of the seething, sticky anger was lost a little on me, but a 13 year-old is right there, trying to find her own path out of the woods.

The publisher,
Madras Press, publishes stories and novellas whose sale benefit charities chosen by the authors. Aimee Bender also has a story in this series that I am going to look for next.