The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

A great collection of short stories. I find the stories to be very human, and accessible.

I love her weirdness. I love the premise of all her stories, the kind of magical realism that makes you a bit uncomfortable. Which is why i have a huge problem with the cover they assign to her books, nothing is cutesy about Bender's style.

Bender write a very interesting story, but she gets on my nerves with her inability to actually end each story with a conclusion. Every single one in here doesn't end in a satisfactory way. If she didn't write so beautifully, I wouldn't recommend this.

Do you ever add books to your wishlist and forget who recommended a book and how you first heard about it and why you wanted to read it? I wish I knew who recommended this book to me....In a sentence, it is one odd book. In this book of short stories, you never know what is going to happen. You might go to school with an imp or an ice girl. Your father might develop a hole through his stomach the size of a soccer ball. You might fall in love with a robber who takes you along on his jobs. The stories don't have a Twilight Zone feel to them; instead, you feel like you are in the real world you've always been in, but you are looking at things very, very carefully, like they really are.

If you add this book to your wishlist after reading this review, and you wait and wait and wait to get a copy of the book, and then the book sits and sits and sits on the shelf, and then, when you finally read it, months from now, and you wonder what you were thinking when you got it...don't blame me...you've been warned.