Excellent book. Great images and language. A quote from Motherfucker if I may. "...asked the motherfucker, getting ready to motherfuck,...

Then half a page later after using shampoo from the placenta of a sea urchin, "He came out as fresh and clean as an underwater urchin infant." ( )

These stories are very strange and I didn't understand several of them. They will also leave their strange feelings and memories with me for a long time. They are new but in line with a strong tradition. ( )

Bender makes magical realism a thing of the present. I will always re-read her. Not for the faint of heart. I AM HUNGRY FOR MORE! PLEASE DON'T MAKE US WAIT TOO LONG! ( )

Wonderful. Delightful. Insanely satisfying. These stories are dark, poignant, absurd, outrageous, whimsical, parodic...they come so close to being excessive and ridiculous but never cross that line. I loved each of the stories. Read them if you want to know what it feels like to be electrocuted by someone else's imagination. ( )

I don’t think I’m keeping this one in the library –I only read a rfew of the stories and they left such a sour taste that I think it’s going to be culled.
The voice has potential – first person omniscient narrator and deceptively simple language with a folk-tale feel – but the storylines are mean and unwelcoming and the characters thoroughly unlikable. By the time I got to the fourth randomly selected story, I stopped.
“Death watch” tells the reactions of ten men given life sentences by ten doctors – and ends with a clever, despairing twist. “End of the line” tells of a big man who purchases a little man at a pet store and learns to enjoy torturing him.
“The Meeting” kept me reading, because it perfectly maps the unexpectedness of love: “When he met her he couldn’t stand her because she did not fit the shape in his brain of the woman he had planned so vigorously and extensively to meet. And the non-fit was uncomfortable and made his brain hurt…
“He moved his fingers down her whole spine one by one, and during the time it took to do that, his brain remained absolutely quiet.
“It is those empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you know what has happened; before you find yourself, at the base of her spine, different.”
The language is simple and poetic, and male narrator – despite his unbending brain – doesn’t deny the woman a voice. I’m adding this one to my Yr 9 romance unit (yes there’s lovemaking but it’s all metaphoric) because it will lead to all kinds of discussion about the nature of romance as a construct that frames our relationships.
“Off” describes a truly obnoxious woman playing manipulative games at a party. Being in her mind was so distasteful that I didn’t’ bother finishing the story till I started writing this review (no – she doesn’t improve). “Jinx” tells of two banal teenaged girls, each resenting their newly-grown butts. This may be a slice of life, but there’s nothing new of interesting in it’s assemblage. And while “Job’s jobs” seems to be intended as a parable about the triumph of human creativity as God commands a writer to stop writing, an artist to stop painting, a cook to stop cooking etc etc at the point of death, it left me so bleak and despairing of Job’s passivity that I decided not to read further.
I bought this collection as models for our extension writers, having read glowing reviews and (given the very middle school-looking Australian cover and the blurb which mentioned a boy-hero with keys for hands and pumpkin and potato-headed characters) assuming that it was surrealistic writing aimed at a young audience. It’s not.
I’ve given it one star for “The Meeting” but don’t recommend it at all. ( )