http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2014_01.php#020463

What We're Reading
Jim Zafris

Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me

A friend stayed over last week and left Jessica Treadway's Please Come Back to Me on the nightstand. I'd loved the collection when it first appeared as a Flannery O'Connor Prize-winner a couple of years ago but hadn't looked at it since. I picked it up and instinctively gravitated to one of the shorter stories, "Deprivation." It begins, "The baby had been crying for nine hours." That opening reminded me why I'd loved the book when I first read it: deadpan humor leavened with dark domesticity. In "Deprivation," a weekend-long crying jag leads a young husband to fantasize about burying his bawling son in a snowbank. He tells his wife, "I know this sounds terrible," only to be met with hesitant silence. She'd had a similar thought but refuses to reveal it. Instead, she responds to him with "What kind of a mother would I be?" To which he replies, "A normal one, I think." This is the kind of great stuff that echoes throughout the collection.

Stories start out innocently. We feel as though we're driving into a gated community in south Florida -- safe among the protected, predictable houses. But, open the front door and trouble begins. I've always felt that writers like Treadway, who are almost exclusively women, get shortchanged and tagged as "domestic" as if to imply narrower. In Treadway's subtle stories, the stakes are very high and the "revelation" factor resonates as alarmingly as any we get in self-consciously novels. In fact, they echo more profoundly: we're all products of families, no matter how dysfunctional and, in the end, what do we brood about? Treadway's collection will force you to wonder what really happened when you were a kid and, just maybe, make you realize that you didn't see what you thought you saw.

Jim Zafris recently reviewed Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers's Chord Box for Bookslut