Night Beast

March 5, 2018
Most of the 11 stories in Joffre’s captivating debut conclude with haunting epiphanies that crystallize the emotions their characters have been grappling with throughout their telling. In “Go West, and Grow Up,” an impoverished mother and daughter who have been living out of their car for a year appear finally to escape the desperation of their lives, only to have their car stall out on the road miles from help. “Safekeeping” tells of a woman locked away in a bunker who finally rationalizes her imprisonment as an act of affection from the absent lover who placed her there. In “I’m Not Asking,” a woman struggling to cope with an emotionally devastating miscarriage discovers that her increasingly estranged wife does not share her preferred escape fantasy. Joffre’s characters range from everyday moms negotiating the crankiness of their kids to people imprinted with digital clocks that tick down to the time they’ll meet their soulmate and, in the title story, a bride who has sex with her husband’s sister during her sleepwalking spells. They all experience love and loss in a collection that amounts to a cri de coeur for sympathy and understanding. This is an auspicious debut. Agent: Ross Harris, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency.

March 1, 2018
Young, often queer characters search unsuccessfully for solace in this debut collection of stories.In the award-winning title story of Joffre's book, the narrator, Gemma, has fallen for her brother's bride-to-be, Sydney. The two women are carrying on a secret sexual affair--but only when Sydney is sleepwalking. Miserable on the day of the wedding, Gemma remembers their encounters: "I think part of me has always believed love should be like this--painful and hidden, only making itself known when you least expect it and are unprepared for the damage it can do." Again and again, Joffre's stories bear out this sentiment. In the collection's opener, "Nitrate Nocturnes," all people are born with timers in their wrists that count down how many years they have left before meeting their soul mates--but what happens when a glitch means one soul mate is ready for a relationship before the other? In "I'm Unarmed," an adolescent girl being molested by her male cousin, and navigating her first same-sex romance, leaves town after a violent attack on her abuser. In "Weekend," two avant-garde actors filming a long-running television show blur the lines between their real lives and those of their characters. The circumstances here are bleak: Men in the book are either oblivious or outright violent, but the women are rarely able to sustain more than fleeting comfort with each other. This hopelessness is underscored by a kind of narrative blurriness: Details in the stories get attention and then are abandoned, while seemingly crucial moments of motive or interiority are missing. The result is that the stories trap readers in a kind of disconcerting dream--by the time they're over, we feel a vague sense of melancholy without being quite sure why.Joffre's ideas are vibrant, but a lack of development mutes the book's effect.

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April 15, 2018
Each of the 11 short stories in this collection shares a similar lyrical, hallucinatory air. Joffre explores the lives of women: teenagers, mothers, queer women, and straight women, and the deep loneliness, pain, and vulnerability they feel. Even when the narrator is male, as in Weekend and General, Minister, Horse, Cannon, the female characters form the emotional core. The most powerful story, Two Lies, is also the shortest. It explores the tension between a mother's passionate love for her children and her guilt at never being maternal enough. Most of the stories are self-contained, but a throwaway line in Weekend makes the reader reexamine the whole conceit of Safekeeping. Readers looking for happy endings should look elsewhere, as the author does a masterful job of showcasing the danger, both literal and figurative, that women face by loving another person. Perfect for fans of Kelly Link and of Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, Joffre's debut collection heralds the arrival of a new, exciting voice in fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)