Nada Alic's women—the perverts, nobodies, reality TV stars, poetic hopefuls, shameless party girls, and self-help addicts of Los Angeles and its environs—are all wrestling with a shared stark reality: the modern world. To cope, they live in their baddest thoughts: the lush, strange landscape of female make-believe.
At first, superficial appearances, 280-character missives and quick fixes seem to take precedence over authenticity or real intimacy...But eventually, each story pushes into weirder, more vulnerable territory as it captures the (usually female) narrator’s borderline perverse thoughts ... Alic depicts contemporary womanhood with a wry, uncensored voice reminiscent of those in Miranda July’s off-kilter SoCal talesrevel in seedy detail.
This sharp and biting debut story collection is tailor-made for millennial women. Alic imbues each story with humor and a keen talent for precise observation, all with a nonjudgmental wink as her characters traverse our twenty-first-century culture ... Alic takes surprising and sometimes absurdist spins on familiar themes. Each story is bookended by related, Twitter-esque interludes that remind readers that such sporadic, irreverent 'bad thoughts' are worthy of attention and meaningful in a society that persists in dismissing women’s experiences. With a novel forthcoming, Alic is proving herself a bold new voice.
... candid and humorous ... As the characters wrestle with what’s missing from their lives, the author finds mordant hilarity. The more Alic leans into the weirdness, the more addictive this becomes.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
