Reviews for Life's Handicap (Large Print Edition)

The average rating for Life's Handicap (Large Print Edition) based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-26 00:00:00 Magnus Ullen One of my favorite short story collections of all time is Black Tickets, a masterpiece written by Jayne Anne Phillips in the 1970s. So hauntingly poetic and impressive were these stories written about rootless misfits by a young and relatively unknown writer that a giant of the short story genre, Raymond Carver, contributed a blurb to the book's back cover. He wrote: "These stories of America's disenfranchised are unlike any in our literature. She is an original, and this book of hers is a crooked beauty." A 'crooked beauty' is also what the sixteen mostly short-short stories in Svoboda's Trailer Girl conjure up in word pictures. Written in the style of dreamy prose poems about the alienated and edgy lives of the walking wounded, these stories shimmer and dazzle with an intensity that sometimes creates the feeling of the world as a floating, melting cloud of illusion. In the title novella, a woman is obsessed with the idea there's a wild child living in the gully near the trailer park where she lives but nobody believes her. Is the wild child a figment of her imagination to help her deal with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child? The other trailer residents ignore her'until there is a murder. In "Psychic" a clairvoyant suddenly discovers her client is a murderer and then proceeds to exploit him. In "Lost the Baby," an alcoholic couple black out and can't remember where they dropped off their child. In "Sundress" two kicked out foster children move into a house while the owners are away on vacation and pose as house-sitting relatives. For a little while, they pretend they have a home to call their own and are blissfully happy. Models of compression, these short stories are each skillful dramas about the lives of those on the dark side of the American dream. The style is a searing and cutting edge exploration of the long lasting effects of abuse and loss. For those who like elegantly poetic stories, Svoboda's the real deal: a writer's writer who unflinchingly makes us see with an almost hallucinogenic double-quick timing. Her brilliance will leave you breathless. Review by Cheryl Reeves

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-10 00:00:00 Bull Red This book was definitely different and odd but overall I liked it. I will admit that I was expecting al the stories to be about the same very short length and was quite surprised to find the first story - Trailer Girl - to be so long. I wound up becoming fairly involved with that story, and then the others I wasn't so sure of. I'll probably go back and look through some of them again though. I found this book by running a search for female authors - I do that regularly - and then I plugged in some of the names I saw to Amazon. I spotted the name William S. Burroughs in a review that some magazine or other had written in regards to this book and could hardly believe my luck - not many authors are compared to him - so I clicked order instantly. Having finished the book now....well....Honestly I don't know why this author was compared to Burroughs , so yes I was not so much disappointed but confused in that sense , yet I still walked away from this book thinking it was good. I like stories like this where it is just life gliding by like a smooth summer. Terese Svoboda is also a poet and you could tell. They oughta said it was like Ginsberg.... Regardless: It is true that The style in this book is different - in fact very different, in some way it seemed purposely slow or something - but I appreciated this element. It was weird that the writer is from NYC cause the book was so slow I thought for sure she was a country lady. Oh well. Anyways I figure they said it was like WSB cause she writes in a style they consider out of place and unusual just like they consider everything good unusual... Again It's like poetry prose.... Ginsberg... I will say that I am eager to try this author again. She seems to have a good head on her shoulders.