REVIEWS

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In Leslie Jill Patterson’s “Against Fidelity,” the single word because springs open a doorway to the blaze burning up against it. The excitement of possibility is present throughout.

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Alison Powell

Center for Literary Publishing

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"Target" is a compelling, rele-vant story. On one level it's a study in quietly placed wistfulness, placing the reader in its center. The author creates a space that facilitates an experience of empathy. On another level, it's a profound exposé of why we make the choices we make, and how, in the face of consequence, we are able—when we are able—to make peace with these choices.

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Jill Alexander Essbaum

  Able Muse

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In my forty-four years of teaching and editing, I’ve read countless stories about abused women but never one like "Brace Yourself." Without a single scene of abuse (and the sensationalism such scenes almost inevitably create), the story parses its soul-shattering effects. At one point, the narrator says, "It’s odd, even savage, how lies are sometimes tender while truth can surprise you, like a backhand across the cheek." This story surprises us with just such a truth. Reader, brace yourself.

 

David Jauss

Prime Number Magazine

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Leslie Jill Patterson’s "We Know the Drill," arguably the book’s most masterful essay, weaves personal narrative with threads about All in the Family, Lorena Bobbitt, and the portrayal of heterosexual marriage in television: it’s a powerhouse of an essay, more relevant—even prescient, in light of the Steubenville rape case—now more than ever.

 

J. Capo Crucet

Pank

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In Leslie Jill Patterson’s "We Know the Drill," this genre of writing has a masterpiece, a study of sitcom-husband tropes that interweaves personal stories of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, cannily exposing TV’s failures at cultural instruction where it’s most necessary. "Drill" is emblematic of the most expert pieces in this collection, which foreground the personal without being narcissistic. That’s a liberating idea for the cultural essay—criticism that makes art its starting point but not its destination.

 

Mark Athitakis

Washington City Paper

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Trouble Is a Friend of Mine is full of rich writing and a deep understanding of the crooked kind we are. I like, too, the manuscript's emphasis on the necessity of story, that one of the ways we best understand ourselves is by throwing some English at real life to see what remains between margins when the fever dissipates. . . . I fell in love early and often with these people—flawed and fetching and determined to go forward even as the past lies in still smoking ruins.

Lee K. Abbott

Everett Southwest Award