Praise for Mary Otis and "Yes, Yes, Cherries"
"Sadness and humor sidle up to each other, evocative of the delicate balance of melancholy and wit found in Lorrie Moore's stories."
-The New York Times
"These are invisible people in pockets of the city that go under-chronicled... What ties them all together is Otis' strong voice, which is jittery and electric, unsettling like the Santa Ana winds... bringing the same eye for detail from one story to the next."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Yes, Yes, Cherries offers an intriguing batch of imperfect characters and unstable conditions. Otis has a sharp eye for people's habits. She knows how to draw flawed relationships. And under her guidance, hearing about the agony of lust and love never gets old.
-Esquire
"In Yes, Yes, Cherries, a collection of short stories by LA Writer Mary Otis, the heroines are as heartsick as they are befuddled... Otis writes with empathy and a cockeyed wit about characters who seem always to be in love even as they are having sex with their married landlord or hurling rocks at toddlers."
- Los Angeles Magazine
The ten tales told in Yes, Yes, Cherries , Mary Otis's debut short story collection, chart the existential snags and crags familiar to all dreamers. Otis plots an unforgiving but readily identifiable topography. Libraries are sanctuaries, but sometimes snares. Doctors offer prescriptions, but only after they've pumped clients for details about their sex lives. Otis's work resides somewhere between Aimee Bender's behavioral examination and Lorrie Moore's mordant world view. She has a great talent...a promising writer who successfully convinces that the dreamers are as worthy of pardon as the criminals.
-Edward Champion, edrants.com“In a collection of powerful short stories, Mary Otis shines light on how and why we fall in love... intimate stories of vastly different characters... Otis entertains with her remarkable observations about one of life's great mysteriesâ€
- Wish Magazine
Otis' keenly written debut short story collection features characters caught up in longing, indiscretion, and unrequited desire. In the heartbreaking "The Straight and Narrow," a mother tries desperately to connect with, and save, her "orthorexic" (suffering from an unhealthy obsession with eating allegedly healthy food) daughter while also coming to terms with her affair with a younger librarian. Several of the 10 fast-paced stories relate to the lovelorn Allison, introduced in the opening story, "Pilgrim Girl," as a hormonal 13-year-old yearning for the affection of her neighbor's husband while living under the watchful eyes of a prim mother and eccentric aunt. In "Welcome to Yosemite," Allison discovers her husband's infidelity. Later, in "Stones," a postdivorce Allison has an unusual run-in with her ex-husband (and his new family) and her alcoholic therapist. Otis' tales are clever and concise. The Allison stories are the most endearing, since her journey is as unexpected as so-called everyday life.
-Booklist
"In Allison’s first incarnation as a love-struck adolescent in “Pilgrim Girl,†she longs for and, for a time, possesses Rick, the bearded husband of her neighbor Janie. Despite herself, her age, and the embarrassment she suffers at the hands of her mother and aunt, Allison interests Rick and one day absconds with him to Cappy’s Clam Shack during her lunch period. A few fried clams and some chowder later, the two are hidden “where there’s nothing but a Dumpster and a jumble of wooden crates on the ground…It seems like he’s about to calculate her height…Then he kisses her and her insides unfurl, suddenly beautiful, like a lush bolt of fabric thrown out upon a table.†The moment is sweet and singular, a rare overlap between desire and reality, but is also complicated, or tainted, by the lingering, unexamined fact that Rick is twenty-something and Allison is thirteen... Otis does a fine job recreating the contradictory impulses of reason and feeling. Her sharp, lively prose affectionately pinches the cheeks of her many Allisons and maintains a tautness of rhythm that speaks to her ability as a sentence-crafter."
-SmallSpiralNotebook.com
“An adroit debut collection... sharply drawn and notable for it’s depth.â€
-Publishers Weekly
“An assured collection, linked occasionally by character but always by Otis’s remarkable voice, her gift for the luminous detail, the surprising turn, the transcendent finish.â€
- Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Sister Noon
“Yes, Yes, Cherries skates through the margins of American dreaming, it's great poignancy balanced on heartbreaking absurdities. Mary Otis offers a dead-on candor spliced through with perceptual leaps, her realism glinting with near-psychotropic sparks. An irresistible collection, Yes, Yes, Cherries beautifully enacts the poetry of bewilderment.â€
- Nancy Reisman, author of The First Desire and House Fires
“The characters in these stories, whether a teacher who teaches time incorrectly, a policeman-philosopher at the scene of an accident, or a young girl who wears a frosted blond wig and knocks on her neighbor’s door to sell ‘what you need to buy’ show us what it means to be human. That’s all a reader asks of any story. That is, of course, everything. Mary Otis writes stories that radiate intelligence, compassion, and humor.â€
- Ellen Slezak, author of Last Year’s Jesus and All These Girls.
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