Tourist Season: Stories [Paperback]

Enid Shomer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 27, 2007

In Tourist Season, award-winning author Enid Shomer offers ten brilliant, richly detailed unforgettable stories of resilient women, aged seventeen to seventy, each at a pivotal point in her life. Their journeys cross distances of place and mind: A middle-aged Floridian who learns that she is the reincarnation of a Buddhist saint takes daring steps on her path to enlightenment; a long-buried secret forces one woman to leave the daughter she deeply loves; a Radcliffe student faces shocking family truths and taboos during the summer of 1966; an unexpected kinship forms between two women who land in a county jail after an excursion to Las Vegas. These travelers wander through shifting emotional landscapes of love, sex, and relationships, and often miss the destinations they’d wished to reach–of insight, connection, and understanding. Whether journeying to new geographical locales or exploring uncharted personal terrain, Tourist Season offers a provocative, engaging, and often humorous road map of the heart and soul.

“[When reading Enid Shomer’s stories,] the thing one quickly senses is the will and the voice, someone saying, in effect, ‘Relax, be comfortable, I’m going to take good care of you.’ These are very fine stories.”
–James Salter, in Imaginary Men

“Beautifully made, surprising and inevitable, wonderfully inventive and deeply true, these stories are full of small, irreverent, straight-faced miracles. They will lead women of all ages to suspect that the best may be yet to come.”
––Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness and Sight Hound

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Being away from home is a transformative experience for the women in this second collection by Iowa Short Fiction Award–winner Shomer (for Imaginary Men); 10 stories travel from Sweetheart, Fla., to Dharamsala, India, and range from the fantastical to the mundane. In the strongest story, "Fill in the Blank," 20-year-old Florida transplant Garland McKenney and her roommate, Linda, rob a Manhattan physical therapy office. The guilt weighs heavier on Linda, but it is Garland's confused moral compass that resonates. "Sweethearts," about Garland's high school affair with the local sheriff, explores the roots of Garland's criminal tendencies. Shomer has a knack for ferreting out the disappointment of aging, as in the title story, in which Frieda realizes she resents the company of her recently retired husband. Less accomplished are Shomer's stabs at out-there material. In the awkward and opening story, "Chosen," Iris, a speech therapist, discovers she is a Buddhist saint, while "Laws of Nature" features a woman who ages in reverse, à la Max Tivoli. The collection will appeal to Shomer's readership, but will do little to attract new eyes. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

A Jewish Miami housewife is pronounced the Great Adept by emissaries from the Dalai Lama. A lonely teenage runaway from a backwater Florida town pulls off a daring hit-and-run robbery with her roommate in Manhattan. Two competitive women writers attempt to bond during their unexpected arrest for civil disobedience. A menopausal matron suddenly regains her youthful vigor only to lose her husband. Although her heroines may find themselves in unconventional situations, in Shomer's adept hands they appear as natural in such untoward circumstances as if they were their birthright. Vibrantly recognizable, as familiar as the neighborhood babysitter or the elderly woman sharing an elevator, Shomer's female protagonists embody an underlying universality of experience that serves them well when confronted with sudden changes of fortune. Their challenges might at first seem deceptively benign--a college student's summer job working alongside her cousin, for example, until Shomer seamlessly morphs them into situations that sparkle and excite through a delectable undercurrent of danger. Carol Haggas
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; First edition (March 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345494423
• ISBN-13: 978-0345494429
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #851,363 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I adored this book, May 21, 2007

By 

readsalot2 (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tourist Season: Stories (Paperback)

I absolutely loved these stories. We read Tourist Season for our book club (all women), and it was the basis of one of the best conversations we've had in months! Shomer does an amazing job of capturing the women of these stories at unique moments in their lives -- moments that many of us could relate to in some way. These stories are quirky, sometimes funny, and always incredibly human. I can't recommend this collection enough.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simple, quirky, fascinating portraits - sophisticated "Chic Lit" indeed, April 8, 2007

By 

Michael A. Nowak (Methuen, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tourist Season: Stories (Paperback)

In tight, concise prose with vivid imagery that almost reads like poetry, Shomer paints entrancing pictures of women at various stages of their lives. She takes situations that range from the mundane to the quirky to elucidate women we might know - our sisters, our daughters, our wives, our mothers. Stories even a guy can appreciate.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Travelers Unlimited, April 13, 2007

By 

charm city chick (Baltimore, Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tourist Season: Stories (Paperback)

These tourists take the reader, by plane, by boat, by grayhound bus and most of all by surprise to amazing unexplored territory. The women and men in the stories shaked, rattled and rolled me into their worlds: worlds which are ordinary and outside and beyond that too. Shomers words, her vibrant images, the emotional depth and sparkling jewel of humor,and pathos ah ha the reader with unexpected possibilities. The journeys of each tourist did come to an end, but fortunately, as a reader, I will be a frequent flyer back to their worlds, reading each story again.