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    Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories
    Unavailable
    Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories
    Unavailable
    Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories
    Ebook235 pages2 hours

    Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories

    By Aryn Kyle

    4.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    ARYN KYLE, whose award-winning novel The God of Animals was hailed as "reason for readers to rejoice" (USA Today), turns her gift for storytelling to the lives of girls and women in this spectacular collection. These eleven stories showcase Kyle’s keen eye for character, her humor, and her uncanny grasp of the loneliness, selfishness, and longing that underlie female experience.

    In "Nine," a young girl given to exaggeration escapes a humiliating ninth birthday celebration with the help of her father’s new girlfriend. The dubious benefits of sleeping with one’s boss are revealed when a bookstore manager defends an employee from an irate customer in the hilarious "Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore." A raid on a neighbor’s meth lab strengthens the unlikely friendship between a solitary woman and a Goth teenage girl in "Boys and Girls Like You and Me." And in a notable exception to the rule, "Captain’s Club" features a boy whose devotion to a lonely woman transforms his cruise vacation.

    In moments electric with sudden harmony or ruthless indifference, the girls and women in this collection provoke, beguile, and entertain. Writing with remarkable tenderness and wisdom, Kyle gives us a collection radiant with bittersweet revelations and startling insights, and secures her reputation as a major young talent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherScribner
    Release dateApr 20, 2010
    ISBN9781439109687
    Unavailable
    Boys and Girls Like You and Me: Stories
    Author

    Aryn Kyle

    Aryn Kyle is the author of the bestselling novel The God of Animals and a graduate of the University of Montana writing program. Her short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New American Voices 2005, Best American Short Stories 2007, and The Atlantic Monthly, for which her story "Foaling Season" won a National Magazine Award. She is also the recipient of the American Library Association's Alex Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’Award, and others.  She lives in New York.

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    Reviews for Boys and Girls Like You and Me

    4.5/5

    8 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Two stories here work for me: "Captains Club" and the title story, "Boys and Girls Like You and Me". I'd give "Captains Club" 3.5 or 4 stars and "Boys and Girls Like You and Me" 3 or 3.5. In the rest, most of the characters (mostly female), except some children who come out pretty well, are just awful, and not in particularly poignant or interesting ways. They seem to have just given in to the worst of life in a defeatist way. They can't get over anything, they can't make anything of themselves, they are defined by their victimhood, they choose debasement, they are spiteful. As a reader, rather than feeling bad for them or empathizing with them, I just felt polluted by their attitudes, their selfishness, their laziness.
    • 5/5
      This collection of short stories is one of the best explorations of female emotion and depth that I have read in a very long time. While there are a couple of times I found myself wanting to stop reading, as I was fed up with the bleakness of the female existence and pitiful nature of some of the characters, I forced myself to venture on. For that, I am very thankful.This is a strong reminder that humanity has rough spots, and that women of all ages deal with pain and sadness in a very distinct set of ways. There are the bitches. There are the loners. There are the women who cycle through complacency and paranoia. And I could recognize a piece of myself in each of these stories.However, I have to say, one of the strongest stories has a lead male. "Captain's Club" is one of the saddest tales I have ever read.
    • 5/5
      This was a great book of short stories about various girls and women, most of whom make poor choices in friendships or relationships. I really liked about every story in the book. The writing was great. I enjoyed the dark humor in many of the stories and was touched by many of them. I recommend this book.
    • 4/5
      Boys and Girls Like You and Me is a group of short stories about young people, from children through young adulthood, whose families have broken down in some way. A few are unbearably sad and a few have moments of hope at the end.The most poignant tells of a nine-year-old whose mother left and now her father has brought home a girlfriend. The best of the book was a story called Economics, in which a college freshman watches another girl crumble under the weight of familial expectation. It has the most gorgeous and unexpected ending, not happy by any stretch, but hopeful.
    • 5/5
      I don’t usually care much for short stories; I don’t understand them most of the time, and so they bore me. This collection is different. It grabbed me from the first paragraph and never let go. In each of these eleven stories about young women and girls (and one young boy), I recognized either myself or people I know. There are many, many ways that a woman can mess up her life, and several of these ways are brought to living, breathing, despairing life in these tales. It’s uncanny how vivid these short tales are, despite dealing with the mundane situations of life. Affairs with married men, trying too hard to be accepted, allowing a betrayal to ruin one’s life, compulsive lies- they’re all here, bad choices aplenty. In all these stories, you have the feeling that these lives could have reached dead ends, but you keep hoping for these people. Each story *does* end with the possibility that these lives can be turned around. These are stories about women and girls, but it’s not chick lit.
    • 4/5
      Damaged and damaging young girls and young women (and one young boy) are the stars of Kyle’s eleven moving and almost painful short stories. The process of maturity is never an easy or smooth one for Kyle’s protagonists, some of whom willfully throw themselves into paths leading to self-destruction, others of whom learn both the costs and the benefits of betraying others for self-gain. Stand-outs in the collection include “Nine,” “Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore,” and the title story. Recommended for fans of the short fiction of Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, and Aimee Bender.