A review by christythelibrarian
Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz
3.0
Favorite Stories (The * marks my two absolute favorite):
Flush - A daughter takes her resistant mother to the doctor's for a mammogram. This story showcases one of the recurring themes in this book, that of the role reversal that occurs when children become adults and their parents become like children again.
Visitors - A daughter waiting at her home for her parents to arrive on a visit keeps receiving increasingly bizarre phone calls from her mother as their trip progresses.
*Saving Face - In a totalitarian society, an artist's love for a webbed-feet swimmer ultimately dooms her - the swimmer - to a strange kind of imprisonment.
Miracle - A woman gives birth to a black baby but maintains that her husband (who is white) is still the father.
Sales - In a barren land, a man and his wife trap traveling salesman and keep them penned in their backyard. The man's younger sister looks on with complicity at first until she gives way to a growing defiance.
*Motherland - An island of mothers proves to be a stultifying place for their daughters who grow up with the wrong ideas about the ways of men.
Budnitz' best stories are her more subtle, ambiguous ones. Her other stories are crippled by heavy-handedness and amateurish writing. I would read something by her again. If I were to recommend her, I would recommend reading the short stories I mentioned above and skipping the rest.
Flush - A daughter takes her resistant mother to the doctor's for a mammogram. This story showcases one of the recurring themes in this book, that of the role reversal that occurs when children become adults and their parents become like children again.
Visitors - A daughter waiting at her home for her parents to arrive on a visit keeps receiving increasingly bizarre phone calls from her mother as their trip progresses.
*Saving Face - In a totalitarian society, an artist's love for a webbed-feet swimmer ultimately dooms her - the swimmer - to a strange kind of imprisonment.
Miracle - A woman gives birth to a black baby but maintains that her husband (who is white) is still the father.
Sales - In a barren land, a man and his wife trap traveling salesman and keep them penned in their backyard. The man's younger sister looks on with complicity at first until she gives way to a growing defiance.
*Motherland - An island of mothers proves to be a stultifying place for their daughters who grow up with the wrong ideas about the ways of men.
Budnitz' best stories are her more subtle, ambiguous ones. Her other stories are crippled by heavy-handedness and amateurish writing. I would read something by her again. If I were to recommend her, I would recommend reading the short stories I mentioned above and skipping the rest.