Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls (Anne Casey-Hardy, Scribner)

Office assistants team up to steal leftover food from corporate meetings; teenage girls deal with uninvited boys during a schoolies camping trip; children play under the sinister branches of a creepy neighbour’s willow tree; a woman plots to steal a rich couple’s baby. The 18 stories in debut author Anne Casey-Hardy’s collection are all centred around young girls and women behaving badly, pushing boundaries and discovering independence. As the title suggests, many of the stories have a fable-like feel, with Casey-Hardy successfully heightening mischief and character quirks while maintaining a dark undercurrent of danger. The author expertly laces her stories with the nostalgia of youth, and is particularly adept at describing the confidence, immature frenzy and self-consciousness of teenage girls. Babies and mothers are a recurring motif, which does lead to some story deja vu, as voices and situations are repeated throughout the book. As with many collections, some stories are more successful than others. Some are a little too opaque in their quest for mystery and others end too abruptly for any true meaning to be conveyed. The strongest stories manage to successfully match the characters’ energy with quirky yet haunting plots. Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls will likely appeal to fans of the short stories of Kirsty Logan and Laura Elvery.

Chloë Cooper is a writer and librarian in Meanjin.

Category: Reviews