I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting With My Daddy: And Other Stories
The crisp, melancholy stories inI, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddyshowcase Ellen Gilchrist's many gifts: her effortless prose, her empathy and emotional depth, her irrepressible optimism. In the title story, 5-year-old Rhoda Manning (a recurring character in Gilchrist's books) is allowed to go hunting with her father armed with a BB gun. The reader waits for the gun to hit the wrong target, but it never does. The story is about a disaster-free afternoon, although in "Entropy"--told from Rhoda's point of view when she is "old and gray"--we realize disasters arrive in many guises. Other stories enter the lives of Arab terrorists, pregnant teenage girls, hairdressers, and high-school football players. Gilchrist makes each character human--even the terrorist, bitten by bugs and dreaming of Allah as he waits in a tree for his target to appear. Throughout the collection, Gilchrist’s voice is soothing and trustworthy, full of hypnotic cadences: "Remorse fell like rain from heaven. The golden rain trees were putting out their leaves."--Ellen Williams--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.