The Send-Away Girl

Sutton knows how to convey those mysterious transitional moments when the familiar grows suddenly strange. These tightly crafted, tough and true stories show characters 'waiting for fries at the Beckettian drive-through,' struggling with the inescapable strains of daily life, here presented by a writer who knows how to deliver the goods.

* author of Ambassador of the Dead *

From the opening pages of Barbara Sutton's collection I had the exhilarating sense of being in the presence of a remarkable new voice: wicked, pungent, exquisitely intelligent, wildly humorous. And each successive story only served to deepen my admiration for this writer's originality and for her empathy with a startlingly wide range of characters: old and young, drunk and sober, male and female, naive and cynical. The Send-Away Girl is a splendidly accomplished debut.

* author of Eva Moves the Furniture *

Sutton's 10 tales display an absolutely wild sense of humor, running the gamut from witty erudition to outright silliness. . . . Each story is made vivid by Sutton's fierce intelligence, captivating dialogue, and unique scenarios. . . . Fresh and funny stories.

* Booklist (starred review) *

The pretext for these stories is to entertain; their subtext is to make readers think. Sutton accomplishes both.

* Salem Press *

An extraordinary satisfaction results from encountering an author who writes in a way specific to one’s own time and place. The stories in Belmont resident Barbara Sutton’s fierce and funny debut collection, The Send-Away Girl, are of the present: the present time, this moment in the modern world, and the present place, Boston. Although her Flannery O’Connor Award-winning collection will certainly appeal to audiences outside Boston, readers in town are in for a particular delight. . . . There are moments when the prose just shines. Sutton finds an undeniable comedy in our darkest sorrows.

Lose yourself in a sensorial field day as Barbara Sutton paints an intricate, picturesque vision of her character's world. Creep behind their eyes and find yourself in a Twilight Zone moment, where somehow you're vacuumed from your futon into the story, then, to your surprise, suddenly plucked from it (how did she do that?).

Companionship emerges in unexpected places for the characters of Sutton’s shining collection of ten short stories, a Flannery O’Connor Award-winning debut that brims with life and wit. . . . The unexpected unites the impressive range of voices in this delightful, imaginative book. Readers who've enjoyed Julie Hecht and Margot Livesey will relish the cool humor of Sutton's debut.

In ‘Tra il Devoto et Profano’ and especially in the title story, [Barbara Sutton] evokes the lost urban world of Nathanael West, while in others, like ‘Risk Merchants,’ she wryly demonstrates how times—and fiction—have changed. . . . Sutton’s fiction is about impermanence and abandonment, and at her best, in a story like ‘Rabbit Punch,’ she enlivens these themes with a gutsy combination of pathos and personal terror.