Beasts & Children

Starred review from January 18, 2016
The monkeys, seals, elephants, pangolins, sunfish, and domestic pets of Parker's wonderful collection of linked stories offer sublime metaphors and splendid foils for the floundering adults, as prone to moments of astonishing cruelty as the beasts are to sudden vengeance. Characters include sisters Carline and Cissy Bowman, whose family spends a fortune to ransom the father out of Thailand in "The White Elephant"; another pair of sisters, Jill and Maizie, are daughters of diplomats stationed in Ching Mai, and who venture out of their compound in "Rainy Season." Other stories involve a road trip to catch a lover ("The Balcony"); Jill and Maizie visiting a Thai orphanage ("Endangered Creatures"), and Carline and Cissy dealing with memories of their mother's bout with cancer ("Catastrophic Molt"). More than the dissatisfied and guilty adults, Parker's sympathies lie with the children, who with preternatural calm and piercing devotion survive early formative ruptures that will haunt them. Parker's sentences are clear, polished, finely-faceted gems, the images incandescent and precise, the tone balanced between the hypnotic and the absurd. Drawing out the implacable connections between beauty and danger, between love and pain, each individual story delivers a final punch of surprise both unpremeditated and yet perfect, "whole and alive in the way that only children and animals seem to be." It's to Parker's credit that the collection feels as complete as a novel, a journey transporting readers from the exotic to the familiar, leaving them blinking, dry-mouthed, and changed. Agent: Ellen Levine, Trident Media Group.

October 15, 2015
A debut collection of short stories offers an unrelenting examination of the loneliness, helplessness, and daily cruelties of our contemporary world. This book is composed of linked stories that pursue three families across several decades. Parker writes brutally but with humor about each family's desperate endeavors. These are characters as unprepared for intimacy as they are for trauma. One mother, unable to face or even inform her daughters of her cancer diagnosis, directs her energies toward the elephant seals massed together on the shore near her home. The seals have come to mate and to molt, a process known as "catastrophic molting" (the story gets its title from this term), whereby the seals cast off their old skins in favor of velvety new ones. At first, the seals disgust her, but she eventually tames one and comes repeatedly to brush its molting skin away. The metaphor is apt: the woman who watches the seals is dying from melanoma and, unable to shed her own skin, distracts herself with the small comforts of keeping up appearances: powdering her nose, reapplying lipstick. Her daughter discovers her illness only when her wig is blown off in the wind. Taken together, these stories provide a vivid kaleidoscope of narratives. Characters appear as children and then reappear, later in the book, married and with children of their own. Their stories are told and retold from varying perspectives, which provide new insight into their histories in the same way that a mystery can be pieced together from new details. As Parker's title suggests, animals and children take a central role in the book; in each story, they are the registrars of pain inflicted upon, and by, a grown-up world. This riveting collection executes a grim autopsy on American family life.

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June 1, 2016

In America, a lonely immigrant mother drives her car into a river, drowning herself and her two children. In Thailand, a teenage girl convinces her younger sister to cruise and drink with grown men. A father forces his son to kill a kitten, desiring only that the boy "be smarter than me." Gruesome? Perhaps. Indelible? Definitely. Readers may not immediately experience a taste for the darkness of some of the family relationships, but after a few stories, they will bite down hard. Parker writes too well to be forgotten and displays a talent for unearthing aches readers have attempted to bury. After Jill, the neglected daughter of a diplomat, finds herself in the apartment of an opiate addict, her remorse is so stark that many teenagers will strongly identify ("She understands this about herself-that her shame will endanger her again and again."). The pieces share characters and are connected. It's comforting to meet the characters again, but there's also the pain of realizing how badly their lives turned out. How do young people recover from the traumas of childhood? Why do some adults carry their pain so deeply? There are no comfortable answers, and this is not a collection for those who cry easily. VERDICT A collection for teens who love to look at the darker side of life. It will have a special lure for ex-pats and will command a strong audience in international schools.-Pamela Schembri, Horace Greeley High School, Chappaqua, NY

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2015
Bless the beasts and children for in this world they have no voice, they have no choice. This lyric, from a song recorded by the 1970s rock duo the Carpenters, could very well serve as the anthem for Parker's incandescent collection of linked stories that follow the lives of Jerry and Danny, Jill and Maizie, and Carline and Cissy. All have been abandoned by their parents to suicide, to drink, to love affairs gone wrong. All have found solace in the comfort of animals that often fare no better: kittens and dogs, for sure, but exotic creatures, too, from monkeys to elephant seals. As children, they cope with humiliation and degradation at the hands of the people they rely upon the most, finding mechanisms to harden themselves to the ways of the world while maintaining a humanizing vulnerability. Parker brings all six characters together in a zestfully inventive and satisfyingly organic way as they navigate their dark and imperiling childhoods to emerge as flawed, fragile yet fiercely resilient adults. An electrifying, daring, and magical debut collection sure to appeal to fans of Karen Russell and Lorrie Moore.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)