Home Remedies (Harvest Original) [Paperback]

Angela Pneuman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2007 | Series: Harvest Original

Tonsillectomies should not be performed at home, cucumbers do not make good stand-ins, and golf clubs are not for hitting your mother.

Angela Pneuman renders these unsettling truths, small and large, with blazing insight in Home Remedies. It is a startling debut collection of stories peopled by Christian fundamentalists traversing various stages and crises of belief, grappling with intimacies that feel like an anxious mix of longing and repulsion, relating to one another in an uneasy balance of eagerness and wariness.

A compassionate and clear-eyed look at religious faith and family ties, Home Remedies marks the beginning of a distinguished literary career.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this dark debut, Pneuman weaves together a collection of short stand-alone fictional stories that share a roughly similar thread of conservative Christian faith in the background. A 24-year-old woman is paid to collect money for charity outside department stores while sharing a twin bed and her neuroses with her young niece in "The Bell Ringer"; "Borderland" portrays a young girl dealing with the ways people hurt each other. In "The Beachcomber," two overweight girls long for attractiveness and male attention, but self-destructive behavior (and a rather gruesome sexual initiation) is a grim foreshadowing. "Invitation," one of the best pieces, explores the obsessive fear of a young Christian teen about premarital sex and how that fear plays out in a camp meeting where her father is the evangelist. The themes are often gritty: mental illness, cruelty, divorce, sexual exploration and coping with death. Pneuman's fine literary writing is excellent enough to land several of these pieces in publications such as The Best American Short Stories ("All Saints Day") and Ploughshares ("The Long Game"). Although readers may sometimes feel a cold disconnect with her characters, Pneuman's knowledge of the lingo of conservative Christianity lends authenticity to her narratives, and in several, she intimately portrays the interior lives and concerns of young girls. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HOME REMEDIES

"Smart, brave and unflinchingly honest, Angela Pneuman is a writer of such flinty brilliance and such dead-on, dead-pan humor it’s often hard to believe you’ve arrived at the end of a story until stunned by the last gesture or word." –ZZ Packer

"Without a doubt, Angela Pneuman is one of the most astonishingly talented young writers working today. Her dark humor evokes Lorrie Moore, the richness and depth of her narratives call to mind Alice Munro, but these stories are all her own."—Julie Orringer

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books; 1 edition (January 15, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156030756
• ISBN-13: 978-0156030755
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #653,797 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Short stories that will stay with you a long time, May 8, 2007

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Home Remedies (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

Angela Pneuman has a sharp sense of humor and great delivery in her short story collection, Home Remedies. Once you read the first story about a young girl who begs her skilled, elderly babysitter to take out her tonsils, you're sucked into worlds you've never seen quite like Pneuman describes them.

A Christian girl, not allowed to date, tries to hide her phone calls with a boy. But the young girl's perceptions are off; the boy isn't interested when his old girlfriend comes back to him. She has to discover this scenario in the lunchroom at school. Tragedy and comedy are meted out side by side in these stories of conflict, parental control, Christian values and the harsh realities of life.

The greatest gifts of these stories are Pneuman's endings to every story. She leaves the readers wondering in their own mind how everything played out. She doesn't give you the sugarcoated, everything-turns-out-fine kind of ending that the reader may expect. She leaves it up to the reader to decide how the stories end. Were the girl's tonsils removed? Did the boy dump the girl because she was Christian and couldn't date?

Armchair Interviews says: Riveting stories for any reader.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful Stories, April 7, 2007

By 

Adam Johnson (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Home Remedies (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

When I hear people talk about Pneuman's stories, they converge on some of the more unforgettable moments, as when a nanny heats an icepick to perform a home tonsillectomy or when a daughter raises a golf club to her mother. True, those are the kind of thrilling moments many people read for, but I think these stories are also filled with subtle humor, beautiful prose and achingly observed mother-daughter relationships. Plus this book will really make you think about the plateaus that follow a loss of faith.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Book, and a Great Read, January 28, 2007

By 

B. A. Overby "Deucerman" (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Home Remedies (Harvest Original) (Paperback)

These stories offer a startling view of life at its seminal point. We see in these narratives, which generally feature young female protagonists growing up under variously oppressive circumstances, how the ravages of living are not reserved for the hardened or the experienced, but are often thrust upon the young with brutal exactness. We see also that the experienced are not necessarily the strong, or the wise, or the compassionate. In Pneuman's literary prism, a narrow ray of American life--that of young girls in rural Kentucky--disperses into its full, wicked, discomfiting, tender, spirited, and rousing spectrum. This is not only an important book, it is also a truly enjoyable read.