Bummer

September 20, 2010
Shapiro's narrow debut collection starts off great but becomes unfortunately repetitive. The title story tracks a 21-year-old punk rocker carrying the child of a junkie she met at an underground rock show. They've decided to marry in Vegas, but when he gets cold feet, she finds comfort in the arms of a suave high-roller who, misunderstanding the situation, pays her for the pleasure. The story is solid and nicely balanced, but in subsequent stories, the narrators, all female, suffer from strikingly similar problems that boil down to being caught between good-girl hopes and bad-girl instincts. (For instance, in five of these 11 stories, the female narrator is mistaken for a prostitute or prostitutes herself.) The writing itself is generally strong (except in "Small," a tediously naughty take on Snow White) and has moments of beauty, as in the melancholic, restrained "Death and Disaster," where a grieving woman accidentally kills her neighbor's bird. Shapiro is clearly capable of writing about more than tragic punk princesses, and, hopefully, her next book will build on that promise.

September 15, 2010

As you can tell by the title, bad things happen to the characters in this collection of stories—but somehow they cope.

The title story begins "Man, I was having a bad day," and this mantra summarizes the life of many of the women Shapiro focuses on. Here 21-year-old pregnant Alison plans a Vegas wedding with boyfriend Sean, but he only agrees to it if they can have a Fear and Loathing theme. They drive across the desert in a rented Eldorado with Sean so strung out he doesn't know what he's doing. Alison instead has a one-night stand with someone (Jose? Ramon? She's not sure...), has beginner's luck at the blackjack table and finally reaches a reconciliation with Sean. Several of the stories are set in the recent past and reflect the anxieties of those times. In "1966," a girl and her sister pick up on their father's cues that he might put a pool in their backyard, but ultimately (and painfully) they realize this is just a fantasy—perhaps a good thing, for the young narrator is irrationally apprehensive in this summer of Richard Speck's murder of nurses and of students being shot from a tower at the University of Texas. In "Night and Day," a 40-ish talent agent sleeps with some of the younger actors she represents and poignantly reminisces about her gay mentor Leon, who had drowned seven years earlier. In "Tiger Beat," narrator Lita surprises herself by taking up with a struggling banana farmer in California and finds "There were dry spells, times I considered lowering my standards only to realize I had none." The only story that doesn't work is a sex-and-drug fantasy based on the seven dwarfs. Page, the narrator, has a tumble with all the dwarfs that will have her, but intense emotional pressures break up the group—and Grumpy eventually becomes a mortgage banker.

Shapiro's writing is crisp, refreshing and affecting—highly recommended.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2010
Shapiros debut short story collection features women, young and middle aged, forced to tackle a gamut of realities, from unrequited love and desire to mortality and transgressions. In Its Place is about a neurotic housewife who impulsively breaks into her neighbors house, where she is captivated by its immaculate order. She soon makes excuses to return weekly, visiting the different rooms and making comparisons to her untidy life and family, until the one day she arrives to find the house is no longer empty. Death and Disaster finds the recently separated Cindy struggling to pick up the pieces from her failed marriage, with events culminating in a darkly humorous incident involving a strangers parrot and a Weber grill. In the title tale, a sharp-tongued artist, Alison, and her deadbeat boyfriend, Sean, travel to Las Vegas to get married. When the nuptials do not proceed as planned, Alison unceremoniously dumps Sean, and heads for the casinos and a subsequent liaison with a mysterious man. Shapiros 11 stories offer engaging and clever portraits of characters dealing with lifes troubling side effects.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)