From Publishers Weekly
The intensity of Staffel's graphic first chapter, in which one of the protagonists guillotines a chicken, stands in contrast to the rest of this mild novel dealing with death and renewal among a group of sympathetic, small-town characters. It's been two years since the death of Helene Hugel's mother, Uta, a German survivor of the Dresden bombing. At the age of 39, Helene is still living in the once-prosperous farming town of Paris, N.Y., with "Uncle" William Swick, who took the family in when they arrived in America after WWII and later became Uta's lover. Searching for meaning in her own life, most directly through her habit of "inventing mysteries" or elaborating stories about ordinary people and events and persuading her boyfriend, Harry, to play along, Helene finds a notebook in which Uta catalogued her memories of the things she lost in Dresden. What little the reader sees of the notebook text is intriguing, but Staffel diminishes its impact by interweaving Uta and Helene's history with a substantial subplot featuring Stella Doyle, an impoverished Mexican-American teenager with an obese, alcoholic mother. Desperate about her mother's condition, Stella pawns the kitchen appliances and takes her to Chicago for acupuncture weight-loss therapy. The two plots don't quite fit together, even if the characters are connected by a few degrees of separation, but Staffel (She Wanted Something Else; A Length of Wire) deftly and tenderly weaves her cycle-of-life theme into an affecting narrative. (Aug.)
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From Kirkus Reviews
A muted and haphazardly constructed story about several lonely souls whose hesitant interrelations barely ruffle the surface of life in the decidedly unglamourous upstate New York town of Paristhe second novel from the author of She Wanted Something Else (1987). I'm interested in possibility, declares Helene Hugel, a 30ish German-American woman who lives on her ``Uncle William Swick's chicken farm, works at the local post office, and more or less passively endures a nonloving sexual relationship with Harry, the middle-aged macho sexist owner of a bar pointedly named Better Days. Most of the characters here have indeed seen such, even if William a dwarf, and therefore the object of ongoing public ridicule and condescensionclings precariously to the possibility that Helenes late mother Uta (whom William had taken in, children in tow, when Uta arrived in America after The War) would have eventually married him. Staffel observes her characters quiet vulnerability with a wry tenderness somewhat reminiscent of John Irving, expanding their orbits to include a piecemeal history of Utas traumatic losses during the firebombing of Dresden (which she painstakingly recorded in the diary Helene now laboriously translates); and, rather more arbitrarily, the story of Stella Doyle, a half-Mexican teenager whose energies and attention waver between her all-American boyfriend on the one hand, and, on the other, the problem posed by her clinically depressed and obese mother. This is a daunting variety of material, all of which often feels like three novellas that havent quite fused successfully into a single story. Readers will understand that these are all lost things seeking some definition, if not fulfillment, of their abbreviated and enigmatic human connections. But Staffels people still dont seem to belong all in the same book, and we dont know what to make of them any more than they themselves do. --
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