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A fearless, darkly playful debut exploring the many impossible choices that accompany 21st century femaleness.
What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness?
Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition.
Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.
Genre: Literary Fiction
What is the right way to handle an abusive partner? An unexpected pregnancy? A toxic friendship? Chronic unemployment? Gender dysphoria? A family member going to war? A disability? Anger? Loneliness?
Finding themselves in disempowering, frightening, or otherwise unendurable circumstances, the girls, women, and non-binary characters in Maria Adelmann's stories look for ways to free themselves into new lives or, at the very least, new states of feeling. Sometimes they do this by hurting someone else or getting hurt; sometimes by submitting, other times by mounting a rebellion. With a special talent for pressing the sharp up against the tender, Adelmann explores the many pathways through the titular condition.
Ranging in style from the magical to the terrifying to the calm tones of a self-help manual, Girls of a Certain Age captures the spectrum of strategies we apply to the pain of life, strategies that we persist in pretending might actually work.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"What heart! What power! What wit! The young women in these funny, subversive, poignant stories are shaped by their contradictions and their desires, their fears and their surroundings, and their longing to break away. Through narratives as heartfelt as they are surprising, they search for connection, for a voice, and for purpose in the often-confounding world they move through, in bodies and situations that both betray and astound them. Maria Adelmann is a true storyteller." - Natalie Bakopoulos
"Maria Adelmann renders the experience of young womanhood so viscerally that I felt I was perched somewhere within her narrators' brains as I read. The subject matter is often dark, and Adelmann grapples with that darkness fully and beautifully, yet these stories are also bursting with wit and whimsy. Adelmann can tease out both the anguish and perverse humor of a situation in a single dazzling sentence. This collection feels like its own singular world, and I loved being inside of it." - Alexis Schaitkin
"Maria Adelmann renders the experience of young womanhood so viscerally that I felt I was perched somewhere within her narrators' brains as I read. The subject matter is often dark, and Adelmann grapples with that darkness fully and beautifully, yet these stories are also bursting with wit and whimsy. Adelmann can tease out both the anguish and perverse humor of a situation in a single dazzling sentence. This collection feels like its own singular world, and I loved being inside of it." - Alexis Schaitkin
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