Customer Reviews

Throw Like A Girl: Stories

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It's difficult to write a short story collection that captures attention. Alice Munro, Jhumpa Lahari, Margaret Atwood, Peter Ho Davies are a few writers that come to mind who do it well. Now I can add another one -- Jean Thompson.

Her stories are about women (not "phenomenal women", like another reviewer wrote)...just women who have gotten caught up in life. Some are emotionally unhealthy, some are finding their way, some are learning how to navigate life. The author is making no political statements here. Instead, she is taking us into their worlds -- and what worlds they are.

These are REAL characters who speak REAL dialogue and seem amazingly REAL. The little simple details bring them to life. Perhaps the best way to judge a short story collection is to ask yourself, "Do I care about what happens next? When I put this book down at night, do I want to pick it up again in the morning?" To these questions, I answer a resounding "yes." Each story sparkles; each captures attention. I'm glad I discovered this writer.

Comments on "The Brat."

"The Brat," Jean Thompson's first in the series of short stories in Throw Like a Girl is absolutely chilling. The reader is given the thoughts of 12-year-old Iris, a strange and rebellious little girl, whose best friend is an obese boy named Rico. Misery loves company, and these two children really complement one another.

Iris seems to hate everything and everybody. She is out of control -- a fearless rebel. She isn't remotely concerned about getting into trouble for being rude to her mother, nor does she seem to care what will happen to her after she, Rico and Barry write and deliver death threat notes to several of their classmates. Later, she is not worried about reprisals after she matter-of-factly kicks her brother in his private parts. Iris seems to be missing a conscience.

When the Jovanovich brothers come looking for a fight after school, Iris and Rico lock themselves in Rico's house. Iris isn't concerned about the Jovanoviches breaking into the house; she just wonders: "how hard you'd have to stab somebody to get a knife all the way through their clothes."

When Rico finds his mother's gun and gives it to Iris, she immediately begins thinking about whom she could shoot. She is on the second floor of Rico's house, and she points the loaded gun out the window at Mr. Ortiz (who has climbed high into a tree that has fallen on a garage next door to dismantle it), but then Iris decides that she likes Mr. Ortiz and won`t shoot him. Later, she calmly considers taking the gun home and shooting her mother or her brother. Iris displays ominous, sociopathic thought patterns, and her final act in the story is to unload the gun and throw bullets from the second floor of Rico's house at Jerry Jovanovich. The bullets clank loudly on the guttering, and Iris shouts "Bang! Bang!" The sudden noise and shouting may have startled Mr. Ortiz into losing his balance and falling.

The last sentence in the story is quite unique, and the author may have summed up the entire story in these few words: "In the corner of her eye, she (Iris) saw Mr. Ortiz struggle briefly to keep his balance, then topple over and fall with his arms outstretched and the ropes curling and snapping around him like banners." Iris is only vaguely aware of the effect of her thoughts and actions on others. And if she does know, she doesn't care. Mr. Ortiz, who represents society at large, is only concentrating on the job at hand and is oblivious to any danger posed by children, until it is too late to save himself and falls -- his tethers pulled loose -- his intentions (banners) waving meaninglessly in the air. The next generation, says Thompson, may be our downfall.

Thompson presents a vivid portrait of our current society, with all of its potential dangers and downdrafts. She concentrates specifically on our adolescents. The young are wandering through life untethered, she says. The single parents are working and have little time to engage in any meaningful parenting. The school officials are also fairly ineffective at solving the children's problems, and little communication occurs between the parents and the school counselors. Thompson presents a template for the reader to consider as reasons for the school shootings in this country of late. Using a thin line of cynical, icy humor, Jean Thompson lifts the camouflage of rationalization and spreads the truth out before us. I think it's an accurate, albeit a disturbing portrayal.

After being asked what she wanted for her readers to take away from Throw Like a Girl, Jean Thompson answered that she hoped they appreciate the "transforming power of literature, how can it remove us from the everyday world and let us see with new eyes." And this book does just that: it takes us away from the everyday world and then painfully drops us back with the suspicion that this fiction is actually very real.

The horrors of normalcy and the tedium of a common life are the forces that drive the majority of the characters in these twelve stories; our "heroines" are far from the romantic or ladylike ilk, but instead more like tough, strong and violent. On the opposite side stand the men in these accounts, mostly unsuccessful and lost, they portray what nobody wants and what most end up getting.

In "The Brat," a spooky but familiar story about teenage anger Iris, the twelve year old outcast main character that is not "pretty or smart or nicey-nice," hates everybody and everything, and we hate her; we hate her and we understand her because we have been there. This character, as most in this collection, is like we were, are or will be. All of these women have the urge to live, to act on their thoughts and to get what they really want, and we know that getting what you really want is a trap. We know that if we go for the cheese it will cut our heads off, and we do it anyways. Jean Thompson is the story teller of our own collective story.

Lust and boredom force Mel in "A Normal Life" to leave her children and husband to marry the man she was having a hot and heavy affair with just to go around in the circle of dissatisfaction, where she ceases being a "sexy siren" and instead becomes "just another nagging, squawking wife."

"The Family Barcus" analyzes the life of a perfect American family, with an obsessively optimistic father who eventually gives up on life. It's told in a first-person velvety prose that slips into the brain and tightly wraps it for a long time.

The wit and black humor of the title are splendidly sinister. Throw Like a Girl is a phenomenal account, and when you read it, you'll understand why it bears the title of the collection.

It's disheartening to read reviews of a gifted writer and see the word "depressing" applied to her work. And why should stories about women have to be about "phenomenal" women, as another reviewer seems to require? (This sounds suspiciously like the demand parents these days make of children: to be "phenomenal" children--why?) If I want to read about a perfect, loving, giving, highly functioning woman, I will read a Hallmark mother's day card. These stories are about women we might know; they're about women we might be.
This is the first book of stories by Jean Thompson that I've read. I'll definitely read more. Thompson is looking into the hearts, minds, and souls of girls and women, and she's good enough and patient enough and generous enough to share with us what she's finding as she goes about her search.

This book is an excellent read. I found it hard to put down. Jean Thompson does a great job with character development and story telling in general. I found the characters to be flawed and intriguing. Also, the plotting, story subjects, and story structure keep you wondering what will happen next. It is hard to write short fiction, but Jean Thompson has successfully accomplished this task.

The few reviewers here who gave this book bad marks called it "depressing," and they may have a point. I would not recommend it as a gift to someone who is in the middle of a breakup, a bereavement or a hangover, but it does have one redeeming quality to it. This book arrived while I was in the last of those circumstances, and it did nothing to improve my disposition. But then, I realized that, in all my reviews here, I do nothing but bellyache about how writers of fiction fail to get the details right.

Superficially, I refer to the writers who fail to do their homework and research details about everyday objects such as cars, aircraft and guns, but the important failing of most fiction is that it fails to get people right. Of course, the characters in the novels of the worst of authors (e.g., Ian Flemming, Sax Rohmer, Dan Brown) are comic book stereotypes, but what about more serious writers such as T. Coraghessan Boyle or Ian McEwan? Why does their fiction read like the Sunday supplement?

Finally! Here's an author who can accurately depict reality down to the tiniest brushstroke, and no, it's not as much fun as the superheros and suspense thrillers. After dispensing with the chaff, Mrs. Thompson leaves us with protagonists who, despite good intentions, behave badly. Flawed people. Miserable people. People you know, here in Prozac Nation. People who behave as you might expect and in circumstances you can easily imagine. And throughout it all is Mrs. Thompson's mordant wit.

Many short story collections I've read have one or two outstanding tales with the rest being Hamburger Helper, but all the stories in "Throw Like a Girl" are uniformly superb. There's not a bad one in the barrel. Best of all, there's never any political or social message; no attempt to save humanity with a parable. It's all simply reality served up straight.

As a final note, I'd remark that in "serious literature," we know it's "serious literature" because it moves at Proust speed. The glaciers have now overtaken it. Curiously, Mrs. Thompson's stories often proceed too rapidly. This happens, then this, and this . . . while all along she's making the same point.

But that's a minor quibble. She really does have the gift of words, and it's difficult to believe she's a college professor.

These stories are terrific: especially insightful about girls and their hopes and the disappointments of growing up. Now that I think about it, a lot of the stories center on disappointments: thinking that doing X would get you Y; doing X, getting Y, and realizing that Y actually kind of sucks.

Terrific writing; much to admire.

Coming of age in the 1960's, I embraced feminism. How disappointing it was to read the dark stories in
Jean Thompson's "Throw Like A Girl: Stories." In many of the stories, the young women, lacking a sense of
self, cling to "bad boys." They define themselves in terms of who loves them - or not. Even the older women
in a few of the stories lack a spiritual core; if enlightened at all, it is by a man in their lives. As an English
teacher, I found Jean Thompson to be an outstanding writer of strong voice. Nevertheless, her stories
left me saddened and dispirited.

I had hoped that this book was truly about "phenomenal" women! I wanted to recommend it to my book group, but this book is too depressing. Not one story was uplifting and made you feel proud to be a woman.

Immediately after reading Throw Like A Girl, I had to run to my Maya Angelou collection for a dose of affirmation and empowerment. This was one of the most depressing collection of stories about being a woman that I've ever read.

Although Thompson's style and talent are obvious in most of the stories, I could not recognize myself or any of the powerful, funny, content women in my life in this collection. Nearly all the protagonists in these stories are a) dissatisfied, b) lacking any moral character whatsoever, or c) alone, lonely or dependent on a man for direction or instruction. Are there women in the world like these women? Certainly! Do I want to know those women? Certainly not! Even spending time with them in print is depressing!

I bought the book expecting to find reasons to celebrate womanhood. I was completely disappointed. While some may call "Throw Like A Girl" a realistic portrayal of women in modern times, I prefer to share Maya Angelou's opinion:
"I'm a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That's me."