Simple Recipes: Stories

Overview

With delicate language and wisdom, Madeleine Thien explores the longing of families pulled apart by conflicts between generations, cultures, and values.Each of these stories captures a deeply personal world in which characters struggle to reconcile family loyalty with individual desires. In "House," a 10-year-old girl longs for the alcoholic mother who left the house one day never to return. In "Dispatch," a woman tries to hold her marriage together even after finding proof that her husband is in love with someone else.

Editorial Reviews

Dysfunction and despair are the themes of this graceful debut collection, in which the protagonists describe their struggles to overcome pain caused by family or poor circumstances. The young female narrator of the title story remembers the moment her immigrant family fell apart: when her older, better assimilated brother was savagely beaten by their father after a confrontation between the two. The girl realizes that this act of "violence will turn all my love to shame and grief." "Alchemy" is a chilling, suspenseful story of disloyalty between family and best friends, in which two teenage girls must confront a sickening truth. In "House," 10-year-old Lorraine and her older sister, Kathleen, loiter in front of their former home in hopes of reuniting with the alcoholic mother who abandoned them. Miriam, the narrator of "A Map of the City," is alternately frustrated and saddened by her immigrant father's inability to make a living and allows his hurt to become her own. As powerful as most of the stories are, they sometimes suffer from the obviousness of their metaphors: the title story invokes worn-out descriptions of rice preparation; "Alchemy" features caged rabbits that don't run away when freed. Still, the simplicity of Thien's narration belies the complexity of her themes. She is a writer to watch.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Author Information

Bio of Madeleine Thien

Madeleine Thien is the Canadian-born daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. She received the 2001 Canadian Authors Association Air Canada Award and the 1998 Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award for fiction, and her collection Simple Recipes was named a notable book by the 2001 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. She lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Back Bay Books

Filesize

873.83 KB

Number of Pages

256

eBook ISBN

9780316087131