Toxic Love Book

Selected by the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association as one of the PSLA YA Top Forty Fiction Titles 2003

Toxic Love is a distinctive collection of short stories by Linda Holeman, each exploring love in all its touching, tragic, and often funny permutations.

In the title story “Toxic Love”, Carla is an intellectual with a stutter, a dweeb. She’s also an incurable romantic. Feeling isolated in her country town, she tries to dream up romances for her English teacher, Miss Kleinfeld, and a handsome colleague. Carla is shocked from her giggly wishful daydreams when she realizes that Miss Kleinfeld’s love was never available. In the hilarious “Something Fishy” the narrator is looking for some excitement in her ho-hum suburban life, and almost without meaning to, she tells a whopper of a lie. The excitement that follows is more than she bargained for.

First published in 1995 as Saying Good-bye, this brilliant collection of work by Linda Holeman navigates through the landscape of adolescence with sympathy and heart.

Lynne Remick - KLIATT

In this absorbing collection of stories, Canadian author Linda Holeman explores intricate, heartrending goodbyes. Poignant, tender, haunting and raw, these ten stories share not only emotional qualities and theme, but also exquisite voice. "Something Fishy" compares a teenager's desire for popularity to the greed of a fisherman's wife in the fable about a magic fish. In "Pas Seul," an adolescent girl must suffer the consequences of her mother's dreams and somehow find her own. One of the more chilling tales, "Shasta," puts the reader inside the head of a girl who is a bystander to a date rape. "Love Unrequited" provides one of the more shocking revelations when a child imagines a love affair between two of her teachers. A teen learns an important lesson in life from a circus performer in "Show Time," while "Looking Out for Dayna" deals with the subject of homelessness. Regardless of topic, Holeman introduces fictional characters so universal and real that to remain untouched by their lives, to fail to ponder their experiences after the last page is turned, is virtually impossible. While soft in voice, Linda Holeman delivers her stories with a hard, resounding punch that will not soon be forgotten. KLIATT Codes: S*; Exceptional book, recommended for senior high school students. 2003, Tundra, 179p.,