There's another rave review of Laura Boudreau's Suitable Precautions over at the Rover. Mark Paterson offers this take on Boudreau's dark humour and style:
In his essay “The Monster Mash,” David Sedaris recalls, as a child, repeatedly exhuming the bodies of dead hamsters and guinea pigs. His motivation for grave-robbing? A genuine aesthetic interest in what his dead pets’ corpses looked like in various stages of decay. As gruesome that sounds, adolescent fascination with death is, as Sedaris points out, not all that uncommon. “At that age, death is something that happens only to animals and grandparents, and studying it is like a science project, the good kind that doesn’t involve homework.”
A similar unshackled attitude about death is at work in Laura Boudreau’s debut short story collection, Suitable Precautions. Most of Boudreau’s characters’ lives have been shaped by the deaths of others, the operative word here being “others.” Death, in Suitable Precautions, happens to a father we barely knew, the former owner of our house that we never met, the drowning victim we read about remotely in a newspaper account. In this way, Boudreau employs death as a deceptively simple foil; her characters come alive because they are not dead. And rather than use the abundance of death in her stories to create a dark or morose ambiance, she does the exact opposite. Like a child who inevitably finds a way to amuse herself at a funeral parlour, Boudreau’s writing is playful and oftentimes fearless.
For the rest of the review, please go here.
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