The First Paper Girl in Red Oak, Iowa: Stories
by Elizabeth Stuckey-French
Doubleday, 206 pp., $22
So many of Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s stories involve offbeat situations and characters that even some of the less successful stories go down as easy as a tangy glass of punch. The best story, “Electric Wizard,” is about a poetry writing teacher who is contacted by the parents of one of her former students, a recent suicide. The parents want copies of his poems, as proof that the boy’s “suicidal behavior arose from sheer genius.” The trouble is, he didn’t write any poems, and the teacher is forced to choose between heartbreaking honesty or hope-giving lies. As she starts to tell them of a fake poem he wrote, she says, “The lie was like one of my daughter’s superballs careening through the house. I could only watch anxiously to see where the next bounce would take it.” The same could be said of these stories, which, though sometimes too cleverly thought up to be entirely convincing, offer just enough surprises and pleasures to keep the reader satisfied.
This article appears in September 29 • 2000.