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First highlighted in The New Yorker fiction issue, here is award-winning writer Nell Freudenberger's debut story collection Lucky Girls is a collection of five novella-like stories, which take place mostly in Asia. The characters--expatriates, often by accident--are attracted to the places they find themselves in a romantic way, or repelled by a landscape where every object seems strange. For them, falling in love can be inseparable from the place where it happens. Living according to unfamiliar rules, these characters are also vulnerable in unique ways. In the title story, a young woman who has been involved in a five-year affair with a married Indian man feels bound to both her memories and her adopted country after his death. The protagonist of "Outside the Eastern Gate" returns to her childhood home in Delhi, to find a house still inhabited by the impulsive, desperate spirit of her mother, who left her family for a wild journey over the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. In "Letter from the Last Bastion," a teenage girl begins a correspondence with a novelist who's built his reputation writing about his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam and who, in his letters, confides in her a secret about his past. Highly anticipated in the literary community and beyond, Lucky Girls marks the debut of a very special talent that places her among today's most gifted young writers.… (more)
User reviews
This is the short story of a family splintering in different directions. The parents are separated and on the verge of getting a divorce. The nearly adult children are in Thailand and Bangor, Maine - worlds apart from one another. When the family converges in Bangkok it is an orphan
I can't decide if I like Alice or not. As a mother, what should she have done when her kid calls up and says not only has she been assaulted, but raped as well? That's not the sort of thing you let drop when the kid suddenly changes her story and says it's no big deal.
Lines I liked, "She drops the dog, possibly robbing him mother of his life" (p 31) and "...often, when you step around the conventional way of doing things, you end up with something worse" (p 56).
"Outside the Eastern Gates"
The protagonist in "Outside the Eastern Gate" is like any 40 year old person facing the deteriorating aging of a parent. There is a sense of bafflement at the role reversal; a sense of sadness about being away for so long. Upon returning to Delhi she remembers the desperate longing for her mother's love while simultaneously coping with her father's Alzheimer diagnosis.
A line to like, "The bogeyman appears in the first forty seconds after nightfall" (p 68). Good to know.