You Think It, I'll Say It

November 15, 2017

A demure Ivy Leaguer learns that a classmate's life is not so golden, and a mother of two has few good thoughts for an old friend whose cheery lifestyle-brand empire is likely built on a lie. Just two of the stories featured in a collection from the New York Times best-selling author.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 22, 2018
In her thoroughly satisfying first collection, Sittenfeld (Eligible) spins magic out of the short story form. Bookended by tales concerning the election of Donald Trump, the collection comfortably situates itself in contemporary America, focusing on female protagonists navigating friendships, family, politics, and social media. In “A Regular Couple,” a semifamous defense attorney reconsiders her past after she runs into a high school frenemy also honeymooning at the same resort. In “The Prairie Wife,” a woman contemplates whether to make public a bombshell revelation that would ruin the image of a lifestyle celebrity she dated as a teen. Another celebrity story, “Off the Record,” places a small-time interviewer in the home of an up-and-coming starlet, with explicit instructions to leave her appointment with juicy details on the starlet’s recent breakup. And in “Volunteers Are Shining Stars,” perhaps the collection’s best entry, a young volunteer at a shelter for mothers and children in Washington, D.C., develops a hatred for a new, bubbly volunteer. As in her novels, Sittenfeld’s characters are funny and insightful. Reading these consistently engrossing stories is a pleasure. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, WME Entertainment.

February 15, 2018
Ten stories by bestselling novelist Sittenfeld (Eligible, 2016, etc.) probe the fissures beneath the surfaces of comfortable lives.Donald Trump bookends the collection, as an alarming candidate in "Gender Studies" and an upset victor in "Do-Over." His unexpected election suits the characters' sense of the ground shifting underneath them, often due to false assumptions. Sometimes the mistaken ideas are deeply humiliating: The discontented wife in "The World Has Many Butterflies" discovers that the man with whom she's been sharing bitchy assessments of fellow members of their affluent Houston social set is not the soul mate she thought and has been judging her by the conventional standards she believed they both despised. Sometimes they're oddly liberating, as when the annoyingly perky wife and mother in "Bad Latch" proves to have some gumption to back up her chipper proclamations. But even the most positive stories have an undercurrent of unease. The protagonists of "Off the Record" and "The Prairie Wife" feel overwhelmed by the demands of parenthood; it's probably not a coincidence that both are also grappling with mixed feelings about celebrities whose lives seem so much more exciting and important than theirs. Sittenfeld adroitly threads themes of disenchantment and perplexity through a group of stories whose characters, despite their reasonably secure middle-class professional status, share a feeling that their lives haven't turned out the way they expected. Occasionally the plotting can be a little pat. The predictable unmasking of the narrator's secret texting correspondent in "Plausible Deniability" somewhat mars a sad self-portrait of a man painfully aware of his inability to sustain meaningful personal relationships. But in the collection's best stories, such as "Volunteers Are Shining Stars," even a slightly lurid denouement feels true to the protagonist's fierce resistance to points of view that challenge her own closed-off perspective. Sittenfeld's own perspective throughout is compassionate without being sentimental, hopeful without being naive.The way we live now, assessed with rue and grace.

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January 1, 2018

Chronicling a rich array of life, love, and loneliness over the past two-and-a-half decades, Sittenfeld's first story collection takes no prisoners, showing us human relationships in all their messy permutations. The collection opens with "Life Since 11/8/16," featuring 39-year-old professor Nell, dumped by her long-term partner for one of his students, who carelessly, dangerously hooks up with her Trump-supporting airport shuttle driver. In "The World Has Many Butterflies," a bored housewife mistakes a casual flirtation for an invitation to proposition her banker husband's colleague. In "A Regular Couple," newlyweds playing cribbage squabble as if they'd had decades of practice. In one of the most brilliant entries, "The Prairie Wife," Sittenfeld rips the film of phoniness off reality television with an especially deft twist. In her final story, "Do-Over," old high school classmates, rivals in a campaign for senior prefect 27 years earlier, get to relive that stolen race in the glare of Election Night 2016. VERDICT In crisp, surprising language, these ten stories from novelist Sittenfeld (Eligible) put couples' foibles under the spotlight, offering damning details of banality to show how the slog of daily living knocks idealized romance out of its misleading No. 1 spot as the goal of pairing up. [See Prepub Alert, 10/16/17.]--Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.