This Is Not Your City

Starred review from May 2, 2011
Plimpton Prizeâwinner Horrocks effortlessly navigates the comedy and bewilderment of being middle class without an ounce of condescension, martyrdom, or sensationalism. In "Going to Estonia," a daughter of Lapland reindeer farmers escapes her fruitless future by attending university in southern Finland, while the American couple on a restorative vacation away from their handicapped son in "In the Gulf of Aden, Past the Cape of Guardafui" is held hostage by a crew of Somali pirates and forced to face their true feelings about the future. In "At the Zoo," as a mother ponders her tenuous relationship to her father and his to her young son while on an afternoon outing to the zoo, Horrocks inhabits the child, mother, and grandfather with an even hand, rounding out each character's fears and desires. Describing the blue-collar grandfather, she writes, "He is proud to not be vain, although he knows that is its own kind of vanity," and the boy has a terrible realization: "He'd begged for the zoo, and the zoo is a terrible place." It's a standout story in a stellar collection, the perfect example of Horrocks's ability to create an authentic and thoughtful narrative of honesty and hurt and hope.

March 15, 2011

Not a blockbuster, but this book really intrigues me; Horrocks recently won the $10,000 Plimpton Prize, given each year by the Paris Review for the best work by an emerging writer to appear in its pages. Judging from a few pieces, her writing is forthright and unfussy but with unsettling little shadows: a woman on a cruise ship held by pirates writes postcards her disabled son will never read, for instance. Read if you want to know who's coming.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2011

This debut collection moves from the Midwest to Russia, Greece, Estonia, and a cruise ship off the coast of Africa. Most of the main characters are women, mostly young and naive, who find themselves in situations they can't comprehend. Many, like the woman in the title story and another on vacation at a Greek seaside resort ("The Lion Gate"), have entered into a foreign culture or an unfamiliar situation, leading to misunderstanding, alienation, and a deepening sense of psychological confusion. The woman in the story "Embodied" has an absolute belief in her sense of reincarnation and in identifying past lives of others, which leads to a tragic occurrence. In "Zolaria," a woman recalls her childhood and a close friendship with a neighbor who contracted cancer and died. VERDICT The author has a fine eye for detail in description and scene setting and moves the story lines along jaggedly so the reader is caught off guard and disoriented like the characters. Many of the stories are bleak, painfully and realistically detailing lives gone awry, to sometimes disturbing effect. Recommended for savvy fiction readers. [See Prepub Alert, 2/21/11.]--Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.