Her Adult Life, Stories
The characters who populate Jenn Scott’s debut collection are both trapped and adrift. Stuck in dead-end jobs or stagnant relationships or simply caught in the grip of their own inertia, they opt out, act out, and strike out, searching for emotional sustenance in a landscape of pointless patterns and dwindling hopes. Cuttingly clever remarks and excoriating observations act as shields—thrown up to protect an aching vulnerability, a bewildering sense of loss…of being lost in a world rife with expectations, where responsibility is ritualistic and meaning elusive.
Assumed identities, Russian mail-order brides, pie theft, lost (and found) cleavers, coworkers who commit murder, the sudden ballooning of breasts, conversations with the (surprisingly opinionated) vegetables in a restaurant’s walk-in cooler: in stories sharply funny and deeply poignant, situations that delight and discomfit, Scott explores the “complicated, or simple, ways in which we settle.”
Longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
Reviews by/in Kirkus, Georgia Review, Necessary Fiction
Please consider purchasing this book from my local Oakland booksellers.