All the women in this collection are uncertain observers, hyperaware yet unable to divine meaning until it’s too late ... Thankfully, the realistic doesn’t carry much cachet in these stories. Wonder and mystery are recurring motifs. The women here are one step ahead of disaster or one step behind it, and either way they are eager to discover what’s next ... Van den Berg, in this wonderful collection, never lets us turn away.
It's a small book, but it feels much bigger. I could have kept reading for days ... In a way, each one is a detective story, sometimes literally and sometimes not. The main character is always a youngish woman, trying to figure out what the hell happened to her life ... There are one or two duds in here. When you can tell van den Berg spent more effort writing than storytelling, they become a little brittle. But after the first story, when the book gets rolling, she's completely on her game ... Plenty of authors write with this sort of detachment. It can be divisive ... But for those of us who do love them, Laura van den Berg is a new name to add to the list.
In the meantime, readers looking for a fresh, emotive and darkly comic take on the modern US and its problems will be highly satisfied with this short collection ... Comparisons to Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore are well founded, with van den Berg’s poignant and funny stories laying bare vulnerabilities in even the most horrible of characters ... Humour is seen throughout the collection, lightening the sombre themes of loss, loneliness, neglect, marital dysfunction and despair ... Van den Berg keeps the reader guessing with twists that seem at once absurd but highly apt for the emotional traumas her characters undergo ... Such burning holes are evident in all of the protagonists in this collection, a vibrant and memorable bunch shouting out in pleasure and pain.
Van den Berg has a lot of fun with outlandish settings, details, or narrative cogs. There’s almost a gung-ho genre thrust to many of them: these women are private detectives, crooked stage magicians, and bank-robbing girl gangs. Yet Van den Berg applies an acidic comedy in stripping these of genre conventions and plonking them into the banal real world ... She also frequently pulls off the reverse trick – finding moments of revelation, of magic, in the everyday ... Just occasionally, Van den Berg gives her characters too much hindsight, tipping into self-help-ish profundity. But largely this is a carefully crafted collection. Tonally, she effectively mixes a deadpan, droll observational humour with a real sense of the wounded, but still beating, heart inside each of her seven women.
Van den Berg’s great talent is taking quite outlandish situations – a sister visits the site of an explosion in Antarctica to collect her dead brother’s belongings, or a heartbroken woman parties with a troupe of French acrobats on the day her marriage falls apart – and boiling them down to a universal emotional essence ... Her style is spare, almost brutally so, with a flair for an intriguing opening line ... An unusually compelling collection.
Laura van den Berg’s The Isle of Youth is a collection of seven substantial and engaging short stories that display a vivid spectrum of malaise ... The stories move through many settings and center around different characters, but all unsettle the reader with a sense that in this world things are just not quite right, and never will be ... What is most notable about all of these stories is how confidently the author dances with conventional plotting but denies the readers’ expectations of conventional plots ... Reading all seven stories together, the reader may become too conscious of this one element of structural repetition to enjoy the stories as much as they would be enjoyed singly. But van den Berg is hardly the first successful author whose work falls into general patterns.
Affection is a scarce commodity in The Isle of Youth, Andover author Laura van den Berg's bleak new collection of stories about rudderless young women adrift in their own lives, where the emotional currents are chilly, lies are plentiful, and family offers no haven ... In van den Berg's dark, unsettling stories, loneliness and abandonment abound. Parents tend to be dead or otherwise gone. Husbands are likely straight arrows, but this only makes them killjoys, unsuited to women who maintain a peculiarly clinical distance from events in their lives and easily absolve themselves of responsibility.
Van den Berg relies heavily on reactions to the present conflict to build character, and requires the reader to participate in their unraveling ... Like any strong storyteller -- both Carver and Hemingway come to mind --Van den Berg lays out the pieces of the past, leaving the reader to put them in place ... Writing disconnected characters is no easy feat -- how to explain the reaction of someone who appears to not actually be reacting? -- but van den Berg succeeds, deftly capturing the complexity and range of her characters' emotions ... Too many of the men in these stories are so inadequately realized that they act as mere objects in the story, coat racks on which the women hang their blame and misery.
Despite their satisfying variety of conceits, however, the stories suffer from a sense of similarity, brought on by their passive first-person narrators ... There’s a kind of sameness—in each there are thoughtless men who feed into the central character’s ambivalence ... The small, genuine and insightful moments at the heart of each tale mark the progress of a distinguished young writer.
If ever there was a writer going places, it’s Laura Van Den Berg, who follows up her debut collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, with the ambitious, modular The Isle of Youth, whose seven stories are arranged along the themes of family secrets with noirish intrigue ... The Isle of Youth can seem a similarly immutable landscape, but Van Den Berg’s repetitions never annoy; they enchant.
A gifted American fiction writer tackles little slivers of crime from the points of view of young women on the verge of self-discovery ... Had these hardhearted stories of trespassers, exiles and beautiful losers come from one of the regular blokes, readers would label them noir and call it a day. But in the hands of superlative writer van den Berg, these stories seem to dig a little deeper and resonate a little longer ... With prose as crisp and cool as that of Richard Lange or Patricia Highsmith, van den Berg is someone to keep track of ... A mesmerizing collection of stories about the secrets that keep us.
