![]() ![]() Evoking the delicate cruelties of adolescence, they are constantly on the edge of behaving in manners too extreme, involved in situations that are too dramatic. Reading these stories, my schmaltz radar set on high, I sometimes questioned the scenarios Orringer had created for her female protagonists. The miracle of this book is that Orringer actually pulls it off. Does this sound a bit extreme? Well it is. The stories are those of girls and young women facing “terrible experiences”-mothers who are dying, children who see other children die-people living on the fault lines of tragedy, captured precisely at the moment when the earth has opened up to swallow them. In nine stories examining responses to pain and loss, this collection’s moral, if it has one, is that pain may not make us better people, but it shapes and twists us, and makes us who we are. ![]() Orringer, a 30-year-old alumna of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, practices what she preaches in her much praised first book, How to Breathe Underwater. ![]() Ne of the things that I resist in fiction is the idea that a terrible experience will lead to some kind of epiphany or positive change in a character,” Julie Orringer said in a recent interview with Robert Birnbaum of the Dallas Morning News. ![]() How to Breathe Underwater: Stories By Julie Orringer Knopf 240 pages, $21 ![]()
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