Cowboys Are My Weakness

Rating:
Summary: Very moving....Pam Houston knows what life is truly about.
Review: Each of the short stories in this book found a common link in my life. I am recently divorced from my last "Cowboy Weakness", and her hunting stories really hit home for me. My ex is both a cowboy and a redneck! I also found that Pam knows how to communicate her stories in a way that actually involves the reader, and gives them a sense of participation in it. Definetly a must have book for the library of any lady that has found herself in love with the "Cowboy" type of man!

Rating:
Summary: Very moving....Pam Houston knows what life is truly about.
Review: Each of the short stories in this book found a common link in my life. I am recently divorced from my last "Cowboy Weakness", and her hunting stories really hit home for me. My ex is both a cowboy and a redneck! I also found that Pam knows how to communicate her stories in a way that actually involves the reader, and gives them a sense of participation in it. Definetly a must have book for the library of any lady that has found herself in love with the "Cowboy" type of man!

Rating:
Summary: Writing is Not Her Weakness
Review: This first collection of stories by a young writer is a stellar performance of expression and will. Pam Houston's stories are strong, powerful, and fun. She has been compared to Hemingway with her straightforward narrative style and depiction of the outdoors.

Reading her stories is like a breath of fresh mountain air, or riding across the prairie full gallop on a horse, or white water rafting down a perilous spring runoff swollen river. With twelve stories in all, she explores the perils of relationships with men and women, nature, and animals. Her titles, "Highwater", "What Shock Heard", "Symphony", and the like, all explore the complex cacophony of living in America in the nineties. Her sentences are tight and frank. She encapsulates bits of knowledge in one phrase.

Throughout "How to Talk to a Hunter" she masterfully uses fragments to compose a narrative. She uses the course of a relationship portrayed through talks with a best female friend, talks with a best male friend, and talks with herself. Houston uses the interpolative device hailing the reader with the "you" statement. Particularly in the mistakes we all have made and we should have learned from. The narrator reminds herself of things, for instance: "This is what you learned in college: A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the conditions of desiring", or "This is what you learned in graduate school: In every assumption is contained the possibility of its opposite." The men are often clever in their own way and described as such. Here "the hunter will talk about spring in Hawaii, summer in Alaska. The man who says he was always better at math will form the sentences so carefully it will be impossible to tell if you are included in these plans." This same man who claims "he's not so good with words will manage to say eight things about his friend without using a gender-determining pronoun." Houston portrays men who are loveable, yet perhaps not dependable, wild and strong, men who the reader can sympathise with and understand why the narrator is in love with them. She involves her women in the same way.

Her heroines are smart, but sometimes use poor judgement. In "Selway" the narrator is conceding to run a rapid stream with her boyfriend Jack, even through the river has claimed a young life the day before and was up another few feet. She says to herself, and the readers, "I stuck my foot in the water and it went numb in about ten seconds. I've been to four years of college and I should know better, but I lose it when he calls me baby." These heroines, brassy and daring, encompass the new woman, the Nike "Just Do It" group.

During "Jackson is Only One of My Dogs", the heroine remarks that she has broken five major bones in her body. She states that she did drink enough milk as a child, she denies that she has brittle bones or that her boyfriend was the reason. She just reckons that the accidents are a result of her life-style. She believes it is "the sports I push myself into, whitewater rafting and stadium show jumping and backcountry skiing, the kinds of good times broken bones are made of." She tells the reader that "the only list that's longer than the things I've done is the list of things I've yet to do: kayak, hang glide, parachute", and she means to do them all.

In "Blizzard Under Blue Sky", which perhaps is the most poetic and dazzling, the young woman is diagnosed as clinically depressed. She claims it was a result of "work that wasn't getting done, bills that weren't getting paid, and a man I'd given my heart to weekending in the desert with his ex." Instead of drugs and psychotherapy she turns to nature to heal her wounds, to "fix her machine." She takes off with her two dogs and spends the night in a snow cave, she pushes herself to her limits on the cross country skis, she talks to her dogs, and in the end, she finds what she is looking for, Joy.

Rating:
Summary: Writing is Not Her Weakness
Review: This first collection of stories by a young writer is a stellar performance of expression and will. Pam Houston's stories are strong, powerful, and fun. She has been compared to Hemingway with her straightforward narrative style and depiction of the outdoors.

Reading her stories is like a breath of fresh mountain air, or riding across the prairie full gallop on a horse, or white water rafting down a perilous spring runoff swollen river. With twelve stories in all, she explores the perils of relationships with men and women, nature, and animals. Her titles, "Highwater", "What Shock Heard", "Symphony", and the like, all explore the complex cacophony of living in America in the nineties. Her sentences are tight and frank. She encapsulates bits of knowledge in one phrase.

Throughout "How to Talk to a Hunter" she masterfully uses fragments to compose a narrative. She uses the course of a relationship portrayed through talks with a best female friend, talks with a best male friend, and talks with herself. Houston uses the interpolative device hailing the reader with the "you" statement. Particularly in the mistakes we all have made and we should have learned from. The narrator reminds herself of things, for instance: "This is what you learned in college: A man desires the satisfaction of his desire; a woman desires the conditions of desiring", or "This is what you learned in graduate school: In every assumption is contained the possibility of its opposite." The men are often clever in their own way and described as such. Here "the hunter will talk about spring in Hawaii, summer in Alaska. The man who says he was always better at math will form the sentences so carefully it will be impossible to tell if you are included in these plans." This same man who claims "he's not so good with words will manage to say eight things about his friend without using a gender-determining pronoun." Houston portrays men who are loveable, yet perhaps not dependable, wild and strong, men who the reader can sympathise with and understand why the narrator is in love with them. She involves her women in the same way.

Her heroines are smart, but sometimes use poor judgement. In "Selway" the narrator is conceding to run a rapid stream with her boyfriend Jack, even through the river has claimed a young life the day before and was up another few feet. She says to herself, and the readers, "I stuck my foot in the water and it went numb in about ten seconds. I've been to four years of college and I should know better, but I lose it when he calls me baby." These heroines, brassy and daring, encompass the new woman, the Nike "Just Do It" group.

During "Jackson is Only One of My Dogs", the heroine remarks that she has broken five major bones in her body. She states that she did drink enough milk as a child, she denies that she has brittle bones or that her boyfriend was the reason. She just reckons that the accidents are a result of her life-style. She believes it is "the sports I push myself into, whitewater rafting and stadium show jumping and backcountry skiing, the kinds of good times broken bones are made of." She tells the reader that "the only list that's longer than the things I've done is the list of things I've yet to do: kayak, hang glide, parachute", and she means to do them all.

In "Blizzard Under Blue Sky", which perhaps is the most poetic and dazzling, the young woman is diagnosed as clinically depressed. She claims it was a result of "work that wasn't getting done, bills that weren't getting paid, and a man I'd given my heart to weekending in the desert with his ex." Instead of drugs and psychotherapy she turns to nature to heal her wounds, to "fix her machine." She takes off with her two dogs and spends the night in a snow cave, she pushes herself to her limits on the cross country skis, she talks to her dogs, and in the end, she finds what she is looking for, Joy.