Review from Publisher's Weekly, 4/27/09
Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters: Stories Jessica Treat. BOA (Consortium, dist.), $14 paper (140p) ISBN 978-1-934414-22-4
In her skillful third collection, Treat offers short, sharp glimpses into her characters' yawning existential anxiety. A wife vanishes from her home in the first tale, “Beached,” narrated by her husband who recalls her “fatal flaw” in seeking out crowded, noisy places in order to fill up the quiet inside her. Similarly, in “Hans and His Daughter,” a wife and mother abandons her home inexplicably, forcing her husband to care for their two-year-old and manage, sorrowfully but rather ingeniously. In the space of two pages, Treat can convey a powerful epiphany, such as the sad state of middle-aged love in “A Visit,” in which an emotionally stunted man prepares his home for a rendezvous with his married love interest, who already recognizes that they will never connect sexually. Moreover, Treat moves among different POVs with marvelous fluidity, as in the vivid and ferocious “More Than Winter or Spring,” about two girls who love and hate each other in equal, cunning measure. Treat has a keen eye for the floor-falling moment. (June)
In her skillful third collection, Treat offers short, sharp glimpses into her characters' yawning existential anxiety. A wife vanishes from her home in the first tale, “Beached,” narrated by her husband who recalls her “fatal flaw” in seeking out crowded, noisy places in order to fill up the quiet inside her. Similarly, in “Hans and His Daughter,” a wife and mother abandons her home inexplicably, forcing her husband to care for their two-year-old and manage, sorrowfully but rather ingeniously. In the space of two pages, Treat can convey a powerful epiphany, such as the sad state of middle-aged love in “A Visit,” in which an emotionally stunted man prepares his home for a rendezvous with his married love interest, who already recognizes that they will never connect sexually. Moreover, Treat moves among different POVs with marvelous fluidity, as in the vivid and ferocious “More Than Winter or Spring,” about two girls who love and hate each other in equal, cunning measure. Treat has a keen eye for the floor-falling moment. (June)
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May 22, 2009 05:29AM
Awesome, Jessica!
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Congratulations, Jessica. Color me forest-green w/ envy.
You kick so much ass it's ridiculous. And in so many ways! When you get a chance, just tell me which book of yours you want me to read, and I'm on it. I consider you a real friend, by the way -- so when people see that book, I'm gonna tell 'em so!
great Jessica, looking forward to reading it.
thank you so much, all of you!Ben: you might start with this one, the newest, and read backwards!
might be a good way to do it--
This is wonderful. Congratulations!
