You Are the Snake

April 22, 2024
The suffocating ennui of girlhood and early womanhood pervades this subtly subversive collection from Escoria (Juliet the Maniac). In “Dust Particles,” girls bond over Ninja Turtles rather than Barbies, and in “Pluck It Out,” they wear Doc Martens with pleated skirts. Often, Escoria focuses on the volatile friendship dynamics between women who jeer at societal expectations under the influence of alcohol. The unnamed narrator of “Hot Girl” recounts how her former best friend—who looked “feral... even when she was happy”—got away with attempted murder, thanks to the hold she exerted on both men and women. In “Roadkill,” a group of college-age women, each bearing the weight of unacknowledged trauma, run amok one summer, devising cruel games that culminate in a terrifying assault on a young man. “State of Emergency” finds an unhappy young couple forced to continue living together in a difficult rental market (“I had... a desire to tell him he was stupid. But what did it matter?”). Even when not much happens, Escoria vividly captures her characters’ shared worlds. These charged and often startling stories hit hard. Agent: Monika Woods, Triangle House.

May 15, 2024
The stories in Escoria's (Juliet the Maniac, 2019) fourth book are kaleidoscopic; they shift and fall into a colorful blur. Most seek to unsettle, particularly related to violence, the grotesque, and the so-called norms of femininity, and many end in unexpected places, dropping readers off startling cliffs and denying catharsis or resolution. A reader may struggle to identify clear takeaways, which is perhaps precisely the point. In one exceptional entry, ""Hazel: A Diptych,"" profound meaning exists in the space between a woman's knowledge of her grandmother's life and her grandmother's actual life, an ultimately unbridgeable space reinforced by the two-column formatting of the story on the page. The young women in Escoria's stories are often in terrible situations, making terrible decisions. In ""Automotive Safety,"" for example, a restaurant cashier's morality challenges the reader from the first paragraph to the last. Readers should bring a thick skin to this unusual collection and expect to plow through it in a single sitting.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2024
Short stories that expose the rages, obsessions, and plights of girls and women. In "The Hot Girl," the narrator's best friend stabs her boyfriend in the leg in a jealous fit of rage, nearly killing him. In "Roadkill," a group of restless and unhappy college-aged girls spend their weekends partying and taunting their peers; one night, they sexually assault a boy. In "The Ryans," two teenage girls vengefully trash the room of their friend, Ryan, who has sold them fake pot. Escoria's raw stories span from early childhood (a third-grade girl's friend, Katie, wants to "play girlfriend and boyfriend" and simulates having sex) to adulthood (in "Hazel: A Diptych," a relative learns about the life of the now-deceased Hazel, who was bipolar and was raped by her father and sexually assaulted her own son). All of Escoria's characters seem to exist in the same fraught and relentless world--one rife with violence, addiction, partying, sexual assault. Many of the stories feature heavy drug usage: a student who tries meth before a midterm, a recovering addict who takes her 60-something heroin-addicted uncle to AA. Escoria highlights apathetic, almost sociopathic women--characters who, upon learning of a hated co-worker or fellow student's death, "wanted to laugh but...didn't." Her stories are permeated by violence, both physical and emotional, and seek to expose the dirty underbelly of everyday, more peaceable life. At times, these revelations can feel refreshingly peculiar; in these moments, the secret pains of womanhood feel collective, shared. In one such tale, a young woman and her boyfriend wait out a storm in Brooklyn while in the middle of breaking up: "My heart was still pounding from the ride but also from the knowledge that this was a person fading, someone who was there in my life but also wasn't." But more often, the stories lack an adequate contextual framework, and feel unnecessarily--even irredeemably--cruel. A damning, if not wholly successful, examination of the violences of womanhood.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.