Amazon.com Review
Elyse Gasco's debut collection is a novel take on an oft-explored subject: mother-daughter relationships. These eight interrelated stories all examine adoption from several perspectives. In "A Well-Imagined Life," the narrator is a young woman trying to imagine the woman who gave her up; in "You Have the Body," she is an adopted woman about to give birth to her own child; and in the title story, the character is about to give up her baby for adoption. Each of these tales offers a unique perspective on the parent-child bond; unfortunately, almost all of them are written in the oppressively self-conscious second-person--a literary tic that can be more distracting than effective. Fantasizing late at night about alternatives to her impending motherhood, for example, the unnamed narrator of "You Have the Body" imagines running away:
Soon, you will be skinny again. You will only wear dresses. You will never be afraid of strangers. You will drink men under the table and sleep with college freshmen. They will read to you excitedly from their textbooks, their cheeks still raw from shaving too fast. You will take a woman lover and live in North Africa with a turban wrapped around your head.
No doubt Gasco's intention is to catapult us willy-nilly into the character's innermost thoughts; unfortunately, page upon page of this relentless, in-your-face
you you you more often than not drives the reader in the opposite direction. (Sleep with college freshmen, you protest. Hell, no!) Applied judiciously, this literary gimmick might have worked; using it in six out of the eight stories, however, is definite overkill. Indeed, the strongest story in the collection, "Mother: Not a True Story," is written in the third person. Here Gasco crafts a deft, darkly humorous portrait of an adoptive mother who creates a fictional birth mother for her dissatisfied teenaged daughter. Perhaps the best way to read
Can You Wave Bye Bye, Baby? is intermittently, so as to enjoy Elyse Gasco's passion and point of view without getting run over by her style.
--Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
Mesmerizing and funny, dark but exceedingly tender, these eight interlinked short stories, by the winner of Canada's Journey Prize for short fiction, explore the mother-child bond and the legacy of alienation, pain and constant speculation that haunts those who were given up for adoption at birth. "It is not uncommon for adopted girls to give their own first baby up for adoption," says an adviser, coldly, in "A Well-Imagined Life." Gasco's characters search for their mothers, imagine them and grieve their losses, heightened in several stories by the powerful emotions that come with the births of their own infants, or in their potent, even caustic flights of fancy. One schoolgirl vividly imagines the convent her mother hid in to give birth, while another seven-year-old girl tells her mother, "No matter how badly I need the money, I will never kill you." Gasco's themes turn beautifully on her deft, assured and even playful use of the second-person narrative. In the title story, a woman who will give up her child struggles with her limited knowledge of a half-sister her mother relinquished for adoption. Her father explained that her mother was attacked. "For a long time you could not imagine what he meant and thought only that to your mother life had always been a big surprise." In a tale entitled "The Third Person," Elle, who is afraid her baby is God, remembers her husband's secretary's remark: "What kind of name is Elle? In French it's just the third person." Gasco loves wordplay and uses it to humanize the sense of isolation her characters feel. A story about a child snatched from her adoptive parents by her biological father, a man frantic with a sense of injustice and almost unhinged by his empathy for animals, is a chilling and painful complement to the other narratives. Rich, sensual language, a deep vein of humor and a graceful, ironic touch brand this powerful debut collection with Gasco's brazen talent. (July)
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