Wicked Women - Softcover

Weldon, Fay

3.49

322 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006550185 ISBN 13: 9780006550181

Publisher: Flamingo, 1996

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A collection of 16 diverse and all consuming stories on the most serious of things, observed with irony, humour and intrigue.

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Review:

Fay Weldon is a writer who understands the value of holding a grudge. Who can forget the years-long vengeance the heroine of her best-known book, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, exacted on her faithless husband and the romance writer who stole him from her? Even the physical extremes to which Weldon's scorned wife goes in order to remake herself in the image of her rival--including broken bones and plastic surgery--are worth it when she finally succeeds in destroying their lives. Horrifying as the conceit might seem in real life, Weldon's fictional revenge, whether served hot or cold, is a most tasty dish. In Wicked Women, a collection of short stories, Fay Weldon continues her one-writer crusade to ensure that bad people get exactly what's coming to them.

But if Fay Weldon's stories are dark, they are also savagely satirical. In "Santa Claus's New Clothes," the children of a recently divorced father have some telling questions for their not-so-nice new stepmother, who also happens to be their father's former therapist. In "Not Even a Blood Relation," a mother turns the tables on her three heartless daughters in a manner sure to delight the reader. Weldon has a clear-eyed view of right and wrong--not for her are the concepts of no-fault divorce or infidelity without consequence--and in her fiction, if not in life, victims receive Fay Weldon's fierce brand of justice.

From the Back Cover:

With Wicked Women, Fay Weldon has created an incisive collection of stories, turning her sharp eye on love, men, therapy, and the myriad of self-deceptions we depend on. Here we meet nuclear scientist Defoe Desmond, a post-Cold War irrelevancy, who is ineptly drawn to a youthful, wily, husband-stealing New Age journalist; three sisters named Edwina, Thomasina, and Davida, who are appalled when their mother finally gives their father a male heir-two years after his death; and Paula, who keeps so still waiting to hear evidence of her husband's adultery that she does not notice she's giving birth. Weldon's world is peopled with therapists who blithely destroy marriages and family ties, husbands and lovers whose greatest cruelty is their detachment, and clever women navigating the perils and pitfalls of domesticity. Her wicked humor and seasoned wisdom are as evident here as always-and tempered by great compassion for the foibles of the human heart.

"A bristling new collection of stories . . . Weldon has become one of the most cunning moral satirists of our time."-The New York Times Book Review

"It is Fay Weldon's gift that the humor she writes seems to emerge unbidden from the weirdness of human nature and the inscrutable equation of the relationship between the sexes."-Chicago Tribune

"A latter-day Aesop of wronged women, Fay Weldon specializes in satiric moral tales in which divine justice is granted to the abandoned wife or forsaken daughter. Weldon's wit is as sharp as ever."-People

"Fay Weldon's comic shafts have never been better directed, her acid tone has never had more of the real Tabasco taste and her ironies have never been more outrageous. . . . [An] entirely satisfactory collection."-Star-Ledger Fay Weldon was born in England, raised in New Zealand, and received her M.A. in economics and psychology from St. Andrews University in Scotland. She is the author of twenty-two novels, including Big Girls Don't Cry, Worst Fears, Splitting, and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil. She lives in London.

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