Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stephanie Zvirin

Critical Essay by Stephanie Zvirin

[Summer Girls, Love Boys and Other Short Stories is a] satisfying collection of nine short stories sandwiched together between two poems reflecting on parent/teen relationships also written by Mazer. Featuring female protagonists, the stories mix the bitter and the sweet of life while encompassing a variety of narrative techniques, settings, themes, and tones. For example, in "Avie Loves Ric Forever," Mazer uses letters, a device she employed in the title story of her last collection, Dear Bill, Remember Me?…, to record the ache of a teenager's unrequited love; in "Do You Really Think It's Fair?" she writes a kind of extended monologue to depict a teenager verbalizing her feelings about her sister's death to a silent therapist; and in "Carmella, Adelina, and Florry," she vividly re-creates a 1940s sweatshop in an effort to expose what things were frequently like for nonunionized women workers during the first part of the century....
(read more)