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    Goodnight, Beautiful Women: a powerful collection of short stories about the women of a small town in Maine
    Unavailable
    Goodnight, Beautiful Women: a powerful collection of short stories about the women of a small town in Maine
    Unavailable
    Goodnight, Beautiful Women: a powerful collection of short stories about the women of a small town in Maine
    Ebook195 pages2 hours

    Goodnight, Beautiful Women: a powerful collection of short stories about the women of a small town in Maine

    By Anna Noyes

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Anna Noyes has produced a powerful, mesmerizing debut collection of loosely interconnected short stories. Assured and atmospheric and imbued with the luminous beauty of the Maine coastline, these stories are bold, unflinching and utterly compelling. Ordinary lives are held under the microscope, making them vivid, extraordinary - steeped with promise yet mired by threat, driven mad with longing, muted by heartache and loss, trapped in the evanescence of memory. With breathtaking control and a rhythmic, lucid prose that is distinctly her own, Goodnight Beautiful Women marks Anna Noyes as an exhilarating new talent.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtlantic Books
    Release dateJun 2, 2016
    ISBN9781786490407
    Unavailable
    Goodnight, Beautiful Women: a powerful collection of short stories about the women of a small town in Maine

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    Reviews for Goodnight, Beautiful Women

    3.5/5

    15 ratings5 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Goodnight, Beautiful Women is a debut collection of eleven interconnected short narratives all revolving around young girls and burgeoning women in coastal Maine. I would not call this a collection of short stories; rather, they are brief scenes that give an overall sense of the confusion of desires of young women on the verge of understanding the motives of men.

      The writing in this collection is intense. Noyes' imagery in these short narratives creates piercing anticipation. The scenes she creates are gripping from the outset, with familiar but haunting characters. I loved the fullness of the stories she wove. One of my favorites, "Drawing Blood", was reminiscent of Sarah Waters' historical fiction. The stories are all about relationships, between husbands and wives, or between mothers and daughters, or first loves. The stories are dark, melancholy, and without redemption, usually leaving the main character hopeless.

      The thing about literary short stories, however, is that often they're just not stories. The stories in Goodnight, Beautiful Women were scenes, or paintings, or like the beginning-middle chapters of a powerful novel. These stories present an overall mysterious feeling of depression, but they weren't stories as I'm used to stories. I'm expecting a beginning/middle/end story arc, an enticing story with a satisfying denouement, and that is not what you get here. With each of these stories Noyes easily grabbed my heart with riveting beginnings and then left me, wilted and abandoned, wondering what happened.

      Noyes definitely has the skill and literary chutzpah to pull off a great collection here, but if you're like me and like resolution, you may be disappointed. I'm looking forward to her next work. Many thanks to Netgalley, Grove Atlantic, and Anna Noyes for the advance copy.
    • 3/5
      Goodnight, Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes is a debut collection of eleven short stories featuring girls and women living in Maine.Most of the young women in this collection are doomed by circumstances or life or bad choices. The tone of these stories is dark and melancholy - you will feel that failure and depression is seemingly just around every corner and no redemption is in sight. The quality of the descriptions and emotions of the women and girls portrayed is well done and notable. Most of the stories end without a firm conclusion, denouement, or closure, which didn't work for me in every case. There was a point where the stories began to meld together into an overarching pattern of damaged women and confused girls struggling against the odds which are never in their favor.Contents include:Hibernation:A woman's husband drowns himself.Treelaw: A young woman's story is told after her father's suicide.Safe As Houses: A thirteen year old girl tries to process the fact that a girl was raped near her house.Drawing Blood: A young woman in the early 1900's begins an affair with the girl her family took in as a maid.The Quarry: Two sisters discuss whether or not they are white trash.Glow Baby: A woman takes her daughter with her as she leaves her partner.Goodnight, Beautiful Women: A teenager takes a road trip with her family during which her mother abandons her stepfather at one of their stops.Werewolf: A young woman looks back at a lie she told as a child.This Is Who She Was: A pregnant college student goes on vacation with her boyfriend's family.Changeling: A woman on a bus trip thinks a woman might be the mother who abandoned her.Homecoming: A woman feels hopeless when she moves back to her hometown with her husband.Disclosure: My digital advanced reading copy was courtesy of Grove/Atlantic for review purposes.
    • 4/5
      Haunting stories about women in trouble in Maine. Mothers, daughters, grandmothers, waitresses - everyone suffers from malaise and moodiness, and the stories pluck at your heart and have an air of nihilism that would make them painful for those who require constant cheer in their reading. Coffee brandy makes an appearance in each tale. There's happy and sad sex and secret lovers. There's some really sleek writing, with no wasted words, and each story is short.
    • 4/5
      3.5 The setting is Coastal Maine and the stories feature women of different ages, flawed women who often make bad choices. Many times they are their own worst enemies. Many of these stories take an unexpected turn, some made me uncomfortable. The endings are mostly open ended, ending abruptly in some, left to the reader's interpretation. Yet, the descriptive touches, the ordinariness of common things again stories that are anything but, make these so memorable. A very assured first novel, gritty, dark, unexpected, full of unexpressed longing, many sexual situations. The title story has a visual near the ending that made this one a standout for me. A father standing outside a truck stop holding two cups of hot chocolate as the mother and daughter drive away. There is more to the story but it is these observations, nuanced touches that despite the feeling of uneasiness, make them well worth reading.ARC from Netgalley.
    • 4/5
      These tales of girls and women all had in common a sense of menace, mostly—but not always—sexual, countered by an almost pathological innocence. The yin and yang of them made for some really strong stories, with lovely language throughout. A few just hit the sense of internal struggle pitch-perfectly—a good collection, worth reading.