Publisher's Weekly Review
Macy (Mrs.) returns with a discomfiting collection featuring characters who take risks and face disappointments. In "Nude House," timid Massachusetts teenager Susanna Gutteridge starts up a sexual relationship with a boy who subsequently becomes institutionalized and is assumed by the townspeople to have schizophrenia. In "Residents Only," a woman named Alex brings her daughters to a friend's beach house in Acapulco, only to discover the host can't make it. What follows is a complicated situation involving access to the pool and interactions with a cleaner, culminating in a devastating accident. In the title story, married American couple Tim and Alison travel to Italy, where Tim must leave halfway through. Alone, Alison drives drunkenly, does a terrible thing, and blames it on the owner of the house where she's staying: "You've ruined this country for me, Luigi!" Often, characters display a propensity for self-righteousness, as with a mother in "We Don't Believe in That Crap" who rails against junk food and television. Throughout, Macy impresses with strange internal monologues. Here's Alex again: "That truculent type of fear gripped me, such as you feel when a plane is boarding, and for now, you have the adjoining seat to yourself." Macy succeeds at dragging the reader, along with her characters, out of their comfort zone. Agent: Brettne Bloom, Book Group. (June)
Kirkus Review
These seven stories center around women and girls who feel a need to prove themselves despite their socio-economic advantages or disadvantages, all of which make them uncomfortable. Class is always an issue here. While some stories concern girls striving to rise above their modest backgrounds, Macy mostly concentrates on women trying to find where they fit now that they're among the elite. The opener, "One of Us," sets the tone. Insecure young mother Frances has never felt quite comfortable among her privileged urban peers. Attending a dinner party with her husband in their new vacation community, Frances is desperate for acceptance. She convinces herself that the other guests' drinking and lack of political correctness are charming until her new friends' racism becomes too blatant to ignore. In the title story, another couple takes a vacation in Tuscany, where the wife's insecurity as a wealthy traveler ruins her trip. In "Nude Hose" and "The Taker," strange men disrupt smart young women's planned trajectories, but only briefly. In "We Don't Believe in That Crap," two daughters knowingly watch less-than-appreciative reactions to their mother's condescending, if well-intentioned, gestures of kindness to the less advantaged; yet the bourgeois discipline their parents have instilled in the girls proves valuable during an emergency. The collection's penultimate story, "Residents Only," offers a different yet complementary take on parents and children while clearly laying out the book's themes. A woman on a trip to Acapulco with her two young daughters recognizes that the control the girls believe she maintains over their lives is a facade and that her desire to prove herself as more than just another upper-middle-class tourist is doomed even before the vacation goes disastrously wrong. In "The Little Rats," the final story, a character comes full circle. A prep school scholarship student whose relative poverty becomes more obvious to her during a trip to France reappears 30 years later as a successful woman in true control of her life. Macy's lively, acute voice can edge toward cruelty but ultimately remains good-natured. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Returning to short fiction following her novel Mrs. (2018), Macy (Spoiled, 2009) introduces characters unified by a sense of disorientation and outsider status in her second collection. In "Residents Only," a woman takes her two daughters to a vacation condo in Acapulco, trying not to draw the attention of the building's other residents while keeping the housekeeper's grandson entertained. Frances hopes that renting a house in Leicester will give her, her husband, and their young son community roots in "One of Us." Wishing to be someone whose friends casually crash with her and her husband, the narrator of "The Taker" stresses over hosting a friend's ex-boyfriend for several days. In the title story, Alison dreams of living in Tuscany, yet is disturbed by the fellow guests and the owner's treatment of the horses at the agriturismo where she vacations. Macy renders each character's emotional complexities in thoughtful detail. With nuanced storytelling and memorable settings, she draws readers into the minds of people struggling to live as different versions of themselves.
Library Journal Review
The common themes of class discrepancies and fitting in are the struggles in Macy's short story collection. The title story starts with an American tourist couple in Italy, discussing school options for their future children; throughout the week, the wife has a list of complaints with the Italian accommodations. The story ends with her screaming at the landlord about a problem that she herself created; out of a sense of righteousness, she shames him for not doing anything about a dog that she accidentally hit with her car. She is like many characters in this collection, blind to her hypocrisy. Most of Macy's protagonists, who range from teen to middle age, are concerned with and/or confronted with social status; they experience status guilt, or status inferiority complex. In "One of Us," Frances wants so badly to belong that her feelings of inferiority are the motivation to be accepted socially by a group of friends who turn out to be less than ideal. In "Residents Only," the protagonist is a tourist in Mexico whose guilt and uncomfortable superiority cause her to overcompensate and be taken advantage of by agreeing to babysit. VERDICT Macy (Mrs.) brings these stories to life with a sharp moral critique and an observant eye. --Sonia Reppe
