Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Love isn't always like a Hallmark card. No more than Family Life is always like a Rockwell painting. Birthdays aren't always happy, and families aren't always made from relatives.
If anything, Life is more like an Arbus photograph: strange and vulnerable and damaged and beautiful all at once.
Human beings are imperfect creatures. And, in spite of this, we somehow manage to connect with each other.
In SOFT MANIACS, Maggie Estep captures this reality brilliantly. Comprised of nine intertwined stories which show two women - Jody, a sexually insatiable and unstable psychiatrist, and Katie, an assistant in forensic psychology who spent her youth traveling with her lion-tamer father and the circus - as shown through the eyes of the men who have loved them, this collection is like GEEK LOVE from the inside. Instead of being physically different, the characters in SOFT MANIACS could easily be called Freaks of the Heart.
Just like real humans.
This book is beautiful and resonant and will utterly disappoint anyone searching for a tenderly-narrated Rockwell-esque vision of love at the end of the century. But those of us who live in Reality will see the reflection of the darkest and most profound secrets of our hearts, and how in spite of our imperfections, we still have hope.
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