Throwing Knives

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This story collection won the 2001 Oregon Book Award for fiction. Judge Dorothy Allison commented as follows:"Astute, passionate and unmistakably wonderful, these insightful stories are rendered in language as strong as the characters Tinsley portrays. these are stories of survivors-not victims-and in every instance they make exceptional choices, choices that show us more about what is possible in the stubborn human soul. Prehaps what is most affecting is the way Tinsley's people reach toward each other rather than withdrawing into themselves. It has been years since I have read a collection that so strengthened my own resolve about the ability of the most desperate of us to confront and surmount the awful choices of our lives. this is a powerful writer working at the limits of her talen-great talent and great work."

Awarded Ohio State's Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction, these finely crafted short stories are precise and concise explorations of character. Molly Best Tinsley has assembled an assortment of individuals, then strategically moved them through situations that feel familiar, yet are driven by intense psychological undercurrents. These are characters whom the reader comes to know intimately, with each sentence containing essential clues that increasingly build suspense and the keen desire to know how the many tensions and ambiguities play out. In "Zoe," a precocious adolescent, largely self-defined by a fragile vanity and contempt for her mother's array of lovers, struggles with the chaos of her home life and sexual awakening, poised at the edge of an emotional abyss before an unlikely relationship subtly illuminates the nature of her distress. In "Square Zero," another vulnerable adolescent, framed by an array of characters nervously trying to achieve normalcy at a holiday dinner, buckles under the uncertainty of where and with whom she belongs. And in five interrelated stories that give the collection its name, a preadolescent girl struggles to survive the dislocation that her father's Navy career demands. This life, which nearly claims the health and spirit of her mother, serves as a backdrop for the girl's acquaintance with dark secrets leading to friendship and forces that gradually erode her innocence. In "Figure Drawing," an older woman on her honeymoon with a man who habitually confronts and conquers senseless hardship and risk witnesses the emergence of her husband's true character when true, but meaningful risk presents itself. And, surprisingly, it is she -- whose instinct is to deal with transience and unpredictability by accepting and briefly embracing them through art -- who is better equipped to survive. In many of these stories, people act in ways that often are surprising, even alarming. Some chose dark paths. Yet -- ultimately resourceful, driven to explore their options, and intent upon realizing personal truths that will allow them to experience life more fully and honestly -- they prove that their choices were not necessarily wrong. For many of this author's older characters, difficult decisions and discoveries arise from a sense that time is running out, that they are not doing what they want to be doing, are not who they thought they would be, or are not with the people who give them what they need. A gradually blossoming self-awareness is the key to many of these studies of character, rendered with economical prose, clarity, fresh, tactile images and nuanced humor. This collection is too good to be read once. Rereading is an opportunity to dig deeper, sifting through the ironies and complexities of the human heart.

& #65279;These stories cling to you and won't let go; reading the book over a period of several days, I felt as though Tinsley's characters - quirky, vulnerable, ironic, and compellingly human - were lodged in my mind. Tinsley's writing manages to both accessible and alluringly elliptical; she has the short story writer's gift for suggesting a whole world with a few deft strokes. Perhaps most haunting are the five linked stories that trace the fortunes of a Navy family posted in Californiaand then Sweden. Cynthia, the oldest child and narrator of the stories, finds herself a social outcast - unable to communicate with her Swedish peers and mocked for her inability to pick up French at L'Ecole Francaise Internationale. By default she develops a friendship with "the persistent Pia," as Cynthia's father dubs her, an intense and eccentric girl who draws Cynthia into strange games of pretend violence. Meanwhile, Cynthia's brittle mother, temperamentally ill- suited to the part of Navy wife, succumbs first to a debilitating case of pneumonia and then to the thrall of the scrupulously vegetarian Dr. Ramaswami; when she mows down the beloved stand of iris Cynthia has discovered, in order to use it as a centerpiece for the dinner to which Dr. Ramaswami is invited, Cynthia experiences it as a personal violation. Sex is lurking around the edges of these stories, and indeed brackets them: from the innocent quasi-sexual encounter the younger Cynthia stumbles into in the first of these five stories ("Throwing Knives"), to her more deliberate - although still ambivalent - venture into sexual experimentation in the last ("Everyone Catch on Love").The relationship between parents and children - mothers and daughters in particular - figures in several other stories in the collection. A precocious young girl subtly betrays her laissez-faire mother by forging an alliance with the mother's latest boyfriend, a fix-it man who decides it's time to rout the starlings from under the eaves of the house. A divorced mother hosts a Christmas dinner that includes a kind of surrogate family - the gay couple next door and their two unruly dogs - only to discover that her troubled grown daughter won't let go of the resentments she harbors. A widow whose adult children "both stick to the West Coast and change addresses often" tries to make a connection with a surly but talented young woman in her art class.Throughout, Tinsley's stories shimmer with humor and memorable detail. One minor character, an immunologist at NIH, ostentatiously puts a spoon back into a pot of soup after sticking it in his mouth: "He is always ready to deliver his losing-battle speech on microbes-their power and numbers versus the frail and futile dream of antisepsis (`picture the Kennedy Center packed with cockroaches, and you've got one can of Raid')." And Tinsley's endings resist the temptation to tie up all loose ends. They suggest more than they say, a