A review by emdawgb
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting
4.0
*There may be a few small spoilers in here. Nothing too important though.*
Let Alissa Nutting take your hand and lead you through her world of unclean jobs for women and girls. Her short story collection features women with a variety of odd jobs and life circumstances. Some stories are quite funny, some are bittersweet, and some seem innocuous before they reveal a devastating punch. The highlights of the collection, as they stand out in my mind, are Hellion, Ant Colony, Gardener, and She-Man.
In Hellion, a woman who has died finds herself in Hell. Her first observation is that her breasts, a slight A-cup in her living days, are suddenly much larger. She soon finds that they spray acid in self-defence when the men of Hell harass her. Unimpressed with the options for dating, she begins dating the Devil himself.
Ant Colony starts with the jarring idea, presented matter-of-factly, that as space on earth has depleted, humans have been required to host an organism within themselves. The protagonist of this story, a beautiful and vain actress, eschewed the options of barnacles or hosting aquatic life in the form of breast implants, chooses to have her bones hollowed out to turn her body into an ant colony.
In Gardener, a physically neglected middle-aged woman begins to fantasise about the gnome in her back garden, who she sees fornicating with the other garden ornaments every night. As she withdraws further from her husband emotionally and sexually, the gnome begins to take on a greater form in her mind and in life.
She-Man starts jovially and openly, with the line 'Ginno doesn't know I'm really a man, but other than that we're completely honest with one another' nestled within the first paragraph. Nutting holds the story tight and faintly amusing before it spirals out of control and unravels towards the end, finishing with a last paragraph so blisteringly final I had to read it twice to take in its whole impact.
Nutting takes no prisoners as she runs the gamut of human experience and inhuman awfulness, from white supremacy to abortion, from suicide to cannibalism, from a man who smokes the hair of corpses to a girl who is sent into an air-conditioning vent to confront the ghost of her mother. In this way, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls might not be for the faint-hearted and easily offended, but it is a worthwhile read that might make you laugh and smile just as often as it makes you grimace and gasp.
Let Alissa Nutting take your hand and lead you through her world of unclean jobs for women and girls. Her short story collection features women with a variety of odd jobs and life circumstances. Some stories are quite funny, some are bittersweet, and some seem innocuous before they reveal a devastating punch. The highlights of the collection, as they stand out in my mind, are Hellion, Ant Colony, Gardener, and She-Man.
In Hellion, a woman who has died finds herself in Hell. Her first observation is that her breasts, a slight A-cup in her living days, are suddenly much larger. She soon finds that they spray acid in self-defence when the men of Hell harass her. Unimpressed with the options for dating, she begins dating the Devil himself.
Ant Colony starts with the jarring idea, presented matter-of-factly, that as space on earth has depleted, humans have been required to host an organism within themselves. The protagonist of this story, a beautiful and vain actress, eschewed the options of barnacles or hosting aquatic life in the form of breast implants, chooses to have her bones hollowed out to turn her body into an ant colony.
In Gardener, a physically neglected middle-aged woman begins to fantasise about the gnome in her back garden, who she sees fornicating with the other garden ornaments every night. As she withdraws further from her husband emotionally and sexually, the gnome begins to take on a greater form in her mind and in life.
She-Man starts jovially and openly, with the line 'Ginno doesn't know I'm really a man, but other than that we're completely honest with one another' nestled within the first paragraph. Nutting holds the story tight and faintly amusing before it spirals out of control and unravels towards the end, finishing with a last paragraph so blisteringly final I had to read it twice to take in its whole impact.
Nutting takes no prisoners as she runs the gamut of human experience and inhuman awfulness, from white supremacy to abortion, from suicide to cannibalism, from a man who smokes the hair of corpses to a girl who is sent into an air-conditioning vent to confront the ghost of her mother. In this way, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls might not be for the faint-hearted and easily offended, but it is a worthwhile read that might make you laugh and smile just as often as it makes you grimace and gasp.