Bulletproof Girl: Stories

Quinn Dalton has a way with words. If you've ever tried to explain an emotion but found that simple words - like anger, happiness, love, joy - just aren't sufficient, then you'll love this collection. It's an amazing book to get lost in, one story at a time. "Endurance Tests" was subtly heartbreaking...I had a lump in my throat almost from the very beginning. After reading "Midnight Bowling," I closed the book, put it down, and just sat there being stunned for a while...like I had to digest it before starting on the next. Dalton is a meticulous writer - not even a spare syllable as filler here - but at the same time wonderfully expansive. She forgoes mundane adjectives and instead creates beautiful descriptions, like "I watch him breathe, touch dripping horns of hair, try to replace my grab with gentleness" (from "Endurance Tests). Whether you're a fan of short stories or not, this book is worth the cover price and then some.

I didn't think I liked short story collections until I was struck by the Bulletproof Girl. I love diving deep into a novel, but I found with the 11 stories in this collection that Quinn Dalton takes me deep, using a snapshot of pivotal moments where challenge meets response. Her crisp, clean writing explores universal themes and routine events in a way that has me rethinking them-and rethinking the short story. It's a great way to squeeze an extraordinary read into a too busy life.

Quinn Dalton's recent collection Bulletproof Girl contains eleven stories about women in peril. Not physical peril in the tied to the railroad tracks "save me Indiana Jones" way, but social and emotional peril. Each story is a snapshot, a day or two in the life of a woman who has come up against something in her life that is big and hard to move. My favorite story was "Lennie Remembers the Angels" about an elderly woman who is paranoid about her neighbors but turns a blind eye to her son's transgressions. There is a physicality to her language in this story: damp heat, dark apartments and overpowering food smells. Like "Lennie," several of the stories in the collection could be mistaken for chapters in a novel; they aren't self-contained. Dalton is very good at fleshing out her characters, and we know their individual histories. As she leads her protagonists through their hard times, we are given stories that are as character-driven as they are plot-driven. The long title story broadens the themes the Dalton explores in the rest of the collection. Instead of one woman, we have three: Emery, May and Celeste, three generations from the same family, all at difficult crossroads and alternately comforting and pitying one another. Emery is smarting from the loss of her boyfriend, her mother May has been driven to odd obsessive behavior ever since her husband moved out, and old Celeste the grandmother is vibrant, but will not sympathize with her daughter, and instead takes them all on a macabre errand.

in a blurb for this collection, i wrote that dalton's stories are brilliant, wild, scathing, hilarious. they truly are... her writing is psychologically rich, and she tackles the issues that i want to see tackled in contemporary fiction by women and about women. dalton is one of those rare combinations of beautiful literary work that is still about us and the complicated fullness of our everyday lives.

Quinn Dalton is a wonderful writer. These stories will make you remember why you love to read in the first place. they are all delicious though my favorite is Back On Earth, a touching and brilliant take on the life of a woman that has been raped. I know you are thinking, "oh no, not another rape story.." But this is not just another story. This is fresh and raw and real. I know that this is suppossed to be a review and not a sales pitch, but I really must say something to the readers out there who are "on the line".. BUY THIS BOOK. BUY IT RIGHT NOW.