Flying Leap Book

Try not to get too attached to the characters in this collection of short stories. Some are easy to keep at arm's length--monstrous women with chins rolling down their throats, hooded hijackers or scarred children with rank breath. But others are more endearing, stealing up to you with their intimacies, lingering in your memory long after you've moved on. The man in the shabby zip-up dog suit who blinks longingly in the hope of getting some scraps; the son who is persuaded to donate his heart to his mother (it's only "a little bit of flesh" after all); the seven-year-old girl in red overalls, smelling of childhood and sweet milk.If Judy Budnitz's stories have a hallmark, it is the inevitable nudging towards a "glorious, disastrous, unexpected turn". Set in an America of one-traffic-light towns, these stories follow the downtrodden and explore how they fall off the edge. But you want to know what happened next, what went wrong. Did he leave her? Did she leave him? Did she lie to him, cheat on him... You want her to slip up, don't you? She doesn't seem real to you yet; she's too perfect. You want to see her make a mistake...Often there is something darkly delicious about this--for just as Budnitz knows how to navigate between the sinister and the funny, she knows when to leave you stranded, squirming half-cocked and when to release the tension with sharp one-liners. Flying Leap is Judy Budnitz's first collection of short stories, published to great acclaim in the States (it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year). It comes to us after the publication of her first novel, If I Told You Once, which was short-listed for the Orange Prize 2000. --Jane HoneyRead More