Show Them a Good Time

October 7, 2019
Disenchanted characters maneuver through difficult settings in Flattery’s surreal and offbeat debut collection. Though diverse in content, the stories come together through their dystopian elements and comparably cynical protagonists. In “Sweet Talk,” a young teen falls for her father’s employee against the backdrop of a series of mysterious disappearances of multiple women in her hometown. In “Track,” the girlfriend of a has-been comedian withstands neglect and abuse from him while secretly contributing to his downfall through an internet forum. The title story tells of a former adult film actress who confronts workplace politics at her new job as a gas station attendant. A woman navigates dating during the apocalypse and finds it to be equally as disappointing in “Not the End Yet.” In “Abortion, a Love Story,” two college misfits unite to produce a stage play that questions the expectations forced upon them as adults. A seamless blend of reality and the surreal, Flattery’s stories defy genre in an affecting yet unobtrusive manner. Readers should expect to be equal parts intrigued and unsettled.

November 15, 2019
If gender is a performance, then the Irish women in Flattery's disarming debut collection veer wildly off script. In "Not the End Yet," a hilarious look at dating at the end of the world, middle-aged Angela commits one faux pas after another: She admits that she dates all the time, loves superficial connections, and, worst of all, doesn't judge the men who claim they could pursue much younger women: "It's a grand historical tradition," she remarks. The young woman in "Parrot" who falls in love with an older man and tries to parent his son is paralyzed by the cliché she's become. Two college students in "Abortion, A Love Story" stage a play of the same title in which they raucously refuse to perform the self-loathing and penitence expected of women who make certain choices. Plot is not the engine here. Instead, Flattery's prose--absurd, painfully funny, and bracingly original--slingshots the stories forward. These female characters never say what you're expecting, and their insights are always incisive. As the teenage narrator of "Sweet Talk" gets a ride home from an older man whom she likes, for example, she imagines different pamphlets designed to keep girls safe, including "the greatest pamphlet never written: a warning of the romantic danger of being left alone in a car with someone you're attracted to." Though Flattery's characters are often recovering from bad boyfriends, abuse, and even prostitution, they maintain self-deprecating resilience: "Usually when he was halfway through hitting me," the narrator of "Show Them a Good Time" explains about her ex-boyfriend, "it would occur to him just how obvious he was. Then he would curl up, say sorry, baby....Baby this, baby that...It was possible that this person who owned me didn't even know my name." Nervy, audacious stories in which women finally get to speak their minds.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 1, 2019
Most of the protagonists in Irish author Flattery's debut collection are women living in the aftermath of pasts they struggle to remember fully?or aren't quite ready to share with themselves, readers, or anyone. The title story introduces the book's somewhat off-kilter universe, in which a young woman works at a make-believe petrol station that holds real (and miserable) weekly meetings. In another story, a young Irishwoman in New York falls in love with an aging comedian who delights in imagining the poverty she endured in "that place," without asking her about it. In "Abortion, a Love Story," nearly a novella, two very alike college students turn past unpleasantness, including their shared exploitation by a professor, into a hallucinatory, two-woman stage play for an audience of ten. The final story, "Not the End Yet," finds a woman navigating the dating scene as the world literally ends. With loads of strangeness, humor, and really great lines ("The world practically crossed the street to tell a woman she had gotten older"), Flattery writes women's uncanny and true lives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2019
If gender is a performance, then the Irish women in Flattery's disarming debut collection veer wildly off script. In "Not the End Yet," a hilarious look at dating at the end of the world, middle-aged Angela commits one faux pas after another: She admits that she dates all the time, loves superficial connections, and, worst of all, doesn't judge the men who claim they could pursue much younger women: "It's a grand historical tradition," she remarks. The young woman in "Parrot" who falls in love with an older man and tries to parent his son is paralyzed by the clich� she's become. Two college students in "Abortion, A Love Story" stage a play of the same title in which they raucously refuse to perform the self-loathing and penitence expected of women who make certain choices. Plot is not the engine here. Instead, Flattery's prose--absurd, painfully funny, and bracingly original--slingshots the stories forward. These female characters never say what you're expecting, and their insights are always incisive. As the teenage narrator of "Sweet Talk" gets a ride home from an older man whom she likes, for example, she imagines different pamphlets designed to keep girls safe, including "the greatest pamphlet never written: a warning of the romantic danger of being left alone in a car with someone you're attracted to." Though Flattery's characters are often recovering from bad boyfriends, abuse, and even prostitution, they maintain self-deprecating resilience: "Usually when he was halfway through hitting me," the narrator of "Show Them a Good Time" explains about her ex-boyfriend, "it would occur to him just how obvious he was. Then he would curl up, say sorry, baby....Baby this, baby that...It was possible that this person who owned me didn't even know my name." Nervy, audacious stories in which women finally get to speak their minds.

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.