What Boys Like is a collection of short stories by promising Canadian author Amy Jones. Although vividly and beautifully written, each story tackles such similar themes that the collection becomes a bit of a bore by the middle. However, the final three stories are stellar and really worth reading.
I particularly liked Where You Are, which is about a woman who talks to the daughter she might have had, planning out what her life might have been like had things turned out differently ten years previously. Speaking to this imaginary daughter whom she has christened Natalie, she describes the kind of young woman she would become, the life they would have, the relationships she would form with her father and step-father. Alternatively filled with regrets, yet much promise and hope, it is a heartbreaking read to know this beautiful 10-year girl doesn’t really exist.
Then there was Post Mortem, about a family travelling to the site of the car crash that killed their son, brother and husband. The story is told from the perspective of two family members, Jeremy and his sister-in-law Theresa and they are coping in the aftermath of tragedy.
Finishing up the collection is Church of the Latter-Day Peaches, about a young pregnant widow attending her husband’s funeral. Jones is very adept at drawing our attention to the minutiae of life; all the quirks and foibles that make us uniquely human and that make life as fascinating as it is.
The other stories in the collection tackle the same relational themes: Mother/daughter, sisters, husband/wife, girlfriend/boyfriend. Jones explores what it means to connect with each other in urban landscapes that shift from Toronto to Halifax, and that play as much a part of these stories as the characters themselves.
Jones is a talented writer with a unique voice, and on their own, these stories are powerful. Tied together in a collection, many of them read too similarly and I would have preferred more variety. By halfway, the stories started to blend into one another rather than standing apart on the strength of their uniqueness from each other (I’m thinking here of Selecky’s This Cake is for the Party which covered the same relational subject matter, but with varied characters, settings and situations which helped to differ one story from another). Jones tends to place similar characters in similar urban settings dealing with similar relationship problems. After awhile, it just gets boring.
Definitely check this book out, but don’t read it in one sitting like a novel. Space yourself through the stories and you’ll likely get more out of it than I did, who naively read it cover to cover as quickly as possible.
Till next time, happy reading!
L J
| TBR = 8 | WPL = 22 |
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