Red Girl Rat Boy

"In Red Girl Rat Boy Cynthia Flood has pared her style down to a clipped staccato that is at first jarring, then mesmerizing. How does she scrape the narrative so close to the bone, yet still manage to emotionally engage the reader? Because she's a master, carefully maximizing the potential of each word ... poetry."--Caroline Adderson, The Globe & Mail "Flood is a highly accomplished stylist, whose technique is tightly calibrated and precise ... Anything superfluous is ruthlessly pared away ... The stories in Red Girl Rat Boy are brief, but dense, requiring concentration and attention ... [yet are] as emotionally engaging as any flat-out storyteller."--The National Post "Flood challenges, enlightens, disturbs ... a stunning fifth book."--The Vancouver Sun "As we have come to expect, Flood's stories reward attentive reading. Realism is the dominant technique, but there are also quirks that bend the reader's ear and excite. Carol Shields used to talk about female storytelling that avoided the "classic" duality of climax and release. Flood's stories are Shields-type stories: multi-orgasmic. Ahem."--Quill & Quire "The Journey Prize-winning author packs a lot [of] power into 11 taut stories that celebrate and challenge women of all types. Flood is unflinching, but her readers might not be so brave. The author is honest to the point of occasional emotional and unsentimental brutality. This is amazing stuff."--January Magazine "With the agility of an acrobat, Flood navigates shifts and turns within time, often lifetimes, while employing a free indirect style that catapults the reader from a character's most immediate experience to retrospective narration and then back again ... These stories are told in a voice that navigates like an underground stream through the deepest channels of the psyche. These stories are felt in the marrow."--The Coastal Spectator "Diverse and peculiar, elliptical and compressed, with no linkage between them other than the spare, sure skill of the writer ... Flood is a master of doing more with less. There are no wasted words, yet each story has a huge expanse and a high ceiling ... Flood, in scant and careful images, places us in stories that require us to see and to think about perspective, about where we are situated, what it is we see, and what to make of it."--The Malahat Review "A unique breed of confident, highly stylized writing ... Creative writing courses would benefit from studying why she does what she does ... Flood's stories are also commendable for covering much emotional ground and character history in very little space."--The Telegraph-Journal "Do not search for a grand overarching theme in this collection of short stories by the prize-winning Canadian author. Flood freely experiments with a style she describes as " elliptical, compressed, imagistic" and features protagonists who are flawed, varied, and -- enticingly -- only partially relatable."--Toronto Review of Books "A strong collection from a Journey Prize winner who knows how short stories ought to work."--Salty Ink "Flood's narratives know no bounds ... her stories break through barriers, surprise at turns ... Flood herself is the hunter shooting right between the eyes."--Pickle Me This "Compulsively readable."--CultMontreal Praise for The English Stories "Cynthia Flood's complex and intricate collection of linked stories takes a deep pleasure in words and language. And the characters stay with you long after you put down the book.--Globe & Mail "Taken together, the stories ultimately achieve a brooding resonance that captures the literal and spiritual dampness of a provincial scene that all but died out with the last remnants of the British empire."--Quill & Quire "Vancouver writer Cynthia Flood has won a slew of prizes for her fiction, and her latest book, a collection of linked short stories called The English Stories, shows why the accolades are so well deserved. Flood is a thoughtful writer whose richly dense prose opens up worlds to explore."--Vancouver Sun "Like metaphors, myths are nearly everywhere. Red Girl Rat Boy tells us that metaphor and myth are not separate from the so-called real world, but that they help to define its politics. And while critics may treat the words and actions of politicians with skepticism, Flood treats most of her characters non-judgmentally--a gesture of respect for them and for her readers."--Literary Review of Canada Praise for Cynthia Flood Winner of The Journey Prize, The Western Magazines Gold Award for Fiction, and a National Magazine Gold Award for Fiction "In Cynthia Flood's remarkable first novel, there's no tidy shuttling between present and past, no chronological storytelling... The complex narrative demands that you pay attention, and it works; like the lives of its characters, this novel is complicated, passionate, and genuine."--Chatelaine "Linguistic dexterity is Flood's primary strength." Sam Knowles, Canadian Literature