Wreckage of Reason

For class I needed to read a book titled “Wreckage of Reason”, a compilation of short fiction from female authors.  When I first read the title I thought how I wouldn’t be able to relate to any of the stories, but as I continued to read I got into some of them.  Some of the stories I had a “oh that’s nice” kind of response, while others I was thinking “this is amazing.”  The story that spoke the most to me was “New York/LA Whirlwind of Romance.”  The story is divided into two parts, the first being “Things you told me on the phone before I met you” and the second part was “Things you told me once I got to Los Angeles.”  Each part is composed of sentences you would hear from the other party, in relation to whether you were talking on the phone or meeting each other for the first time.  Some of the lines in the first part I thought were same for anyone was “I could talk to you all night.”  Each of these sentences could be taken verbatim from the reader’s own past experience with relationships.  Aside from being something you could easily hear in a relationship, each sentence also seemed to speak of attributes about the other person as being amazing, but in reality be really shallow.  An example of this is in the sentence “I love your voice”.  As you get closer to part 2, the sentences begin talking about how excited or about counting down the seconds like “Four days ‘til you get here.  Three more days.  Two more days. In twenty six hours.”  When you get to part 2 the sentence change since pedestals break and fantasies are ruined about the other person, “Yeah, I’ll talk to you sometime.  You need to build your upper body strength.  You’ve got a lot of baggage.”  I enjoyed reading this story because no matter what your personal experience was you’ll find a sentence you either said or heard.

A story that I found confusing but enjoyable was “The Blue Girl”, by Laurie Foos.  The story is about several mothers and daughters who help out a “blue girl” who was drowning and their experience.  At the end of the story, the author mentions how there was some fairy tale attributes incorporated into the story, after reading that a lot of the story began to make a little more sense.  When remembering about fairy tales and myths the one thing that came to mind is about children being stolen away, which appears a lot in this story as fears from the mother.  “I feared infection, a spreading of the girl’s odd blue skin into my daughter’s flesh, soaking it with poison.”  This sentence and throughout the story is used to incorporate fairy tale myths into the story while making it seem more realistic.  In the book, the “blue girl” also seems to enjoy moon pies, which I thought of as the relationship between fairies and the moon.  Overall the way the author seems to create a serious mood and gets the reader to wonder “what’s going to happen next” made the story even better.

“More Than Winter or Spring”, by Jessica treat, was a story that help to take me back to the days when I was a kid.  The way the two girls interact and play around in a realistic way is something I enjoyed reading about.  I felt that Jenny’s character was very dark because of the way she kept pushing issues, like “Jenny’s voice, icicle winter voice, sticks to my throat.  She leans against me, her face in mine.”  I remember as a kid having friends like that who made you say things and push you into scenarios that you didn’t feel comfortable doing.  The various things that the two girls talk about had a feeling of trying to cement the future, where they debate what would happen if their parents died or playing the game “Which would you rather”.  A part of me wondered, as I was reading the story, if one of their games was going to go too far and cross a line, mainly due to Jenny.