Love, love, love Laura’s voice and her storytelling. Reminded me so much of Maryse Meijer and Catherine Lacey for the spooky sophistication — a clever mix for a debut collection. Can’t wait to read what she puts out next.

I've had Hardly Children on my kindle from NetGalley for far too long; thankfully, I got around to it ... a year later. Whoops. That said, this book is a collection of stories; stories which felt very dark and depressing and, well, dark. And while I normally enjoy stories that are eerie, upsetting, and disturbing (that sounds bad), these don't give you enough time to form attachments to characters. I want to blame it on how it's not one story, rather a composite of short-stories, but it's also because some stories were better than others. Some characters were better than others. And, oddly enough, some stories had better writing than others, even though it's by the same author.

Even still, if you enjoy stories that make you think and are not happy-go-lucky, I would try this. It's definitely a collection of odd tellings, that's for sure. But they're also stories that are gritty, real, and upfront, and that's something to appreciate.

The start of this book really set what I thought would be the tone of the book. It was uncomfortable and yet it sucked you in. After that initial story I don’t think any of the others really beat the first one. Each story was weird, odd, strange and not for the feint of heart. Some stories were much slower and much weirder than some. If you’re into weird and don’t mind being uncomfortable definitely check this out. Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this book.

3,5 stars. While I really liked the collection, I don't think it's as memorable as it could be. Even now, I'm forgetting a lot of the stories, and I JUST finished the book.

However, it still deserves 3 stars, because when it comes to rating books the questions I ask myself are "Did I devour this book really fast, almost in one sitting, because I couldn't get enough of it? Or did I go the other way and prolonged my reading on purpose, because I didn't want it to end?" and "Was this book memorable? Will I be able to remember what happens even a year from now?" This book did check the first box, but probably not the second.

I really liked "Black Box" and the ending of "Too Much a Child" in particular (now that's memorable).

This collection of short stories covered a range of different backgrounds. Personally, I was disappointed that the stories weren't more powerful.

Do you like to travel to far off distant places, such as outer space? Or do you like to soak in realism? When it comes to book reading, and you’re of the latter persuasion, you might enjoy the kitchen-sink realism of Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children. Maybe. It depends on how much sink you have in your kitchen, and this book has an awful lot of it. This is a short story collection that generally features distant young girls and women as they navigate through the hardships of life. The thing is, Hardly Children is desperately boring. The title of the book should really be called Hardly Anything Happens. These are stories that are paced at the crawl of molasses, and offer peeling wallpaper that’s a chore to look at. That’s not to say that Adamczyk isn’t talented. She is. She has won awards for these stories, and has been published in prestigious journals. She also works for the Onion’s A.V. Club, and you can’t really say anything bad about a person who works there. (It’s a cool rag.)

While I have my criticisms of this work, naturally, I will say that the author has a gift. And that is subtlety. In one story called “Girls,” three young girls at a grandmother’s house encounter a mysterious strange man who shows up and asks them to scratch his itches on his legs — and presumably elsewhere. This is seemingly creepy and probably amounts to some kind of abuse, but Adamczyk just doesn’t go for the obvious sexual molestation angle. She does something more distinctly quiet and weird. It kind of works. However, the big problem with this book as a whole is that it tends to go nowhere quickly. I have to admit that I kind of checked out when reading these pieces and started to think about my laundry and other things that needed to be done.

For instance, we get a short story about a man who is a kind of performative art piece who allows himself to be hoisted up by hooks in an art gallery for spectacle. It’s a neat idea. However, that’s the only thing I remember about that particular story. Nothing seems to happen. The story just drones on and on until it reaches its end — I would use the word “climax” but there really is none. There’s no release, nothing profound happens, and the reader is left wondering just what the heck Adamczyk was going on about. The author also has the habit of not using quote marks when someone is speaking. I suppose this is a method of making everything in the story become an internal dialogue, something hypnotic and hazy. The real result is confusion of a narrative sort, as you have to figure out when someone has stopped talking and the author is now riding the narrative. It’s hard to take.

In fact, the only halfway memorable story is the first one in this collection, “Wanted.” In it, a woman who is childless strikes up a playground conversation with a young boy, in a town where wanted posters have sprung up for child abduction. In this piece, Adamczyk makes the connection with wanting a child and the dangers of childhood by bridging the two together. However, it’s also a fairly short story by this collection’s standards, so that might be a backhanded criticism. Generally, the shorter the story is here, the more focused and involving it is. When the stories get longer, there’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam to a point where you have to wonder what would happen if this author wrote a novel. Would it be completely unreadable?

There’s a story here called “Here Comes Your Man,” and that’s the most interesting thing about it — it’s named after a Pixies song. It’s about a woman swaying between a truck driver and a young virgin man as her two lovers. And that’s all I really remember. There’s nothing else in the story that’s remotely memorable — aside from the fact that the unnamed virgin has a bit of an Abe Lincoln fetish. The end result is this story, and others in this book like it, will have you hitting the snooze button. A more boring and pointless (and plotless) collection I cannot recall ever reading.

Still, despite the fact that I was not very enamoured with Hardly Children, I do have to give the author some points for being original. I mean, it takes a certain art and skill to render life as it is and try to squeeze it into a written narrative. However, as anyone can tell you, ordinary life can be boring. It needs a gun that shows up in act one to go off in act three (which so happens to be the subject of a short story in this very collection called “Gun Control.”) There’s no flash or dazzle or reason to care — for these stories, for these characters that inhabit said stories, for the collection as a whole. Hardly Children is so dull, you will just find yourself drifting off into some netherworld where at least something exciting might happen.

All I can say is I wish I liked this book more. There’s stuff in here that has a kernel of interest. There’s stuff in here that is well sculpted. There’s stuff in here that takes some risks and does things that regular literary fiction may lack. But the problem is that these stories tend to just meander and not go anywhere. They putter out like a puff of smoke evaporating into thin air. It’s too bad, because one gets the sense that these stories were wrestled into existence. Again, these are very subtle stories. Perhaps one might get a lot of mileage out of that. For most readers, though, you may find these stories simply too boring and dull with withstand any scrutiny. You may find yourself wishing, in the end, that you were reading stories about spaceships, even if that’s not quite your bag. At least in space, unlike the kind of reality portraits that Adamczyk paints, something interesting is bound to happen. Nothing does here. Nothing at all.

Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children is an uncomfortable, disquieting and rather unsettling collection of short stories that draws attention to how little time children are truly allowed to remain innocent, and how quickly we are pushed into the disturbing and terrifying world of adulthood. This collection blurs the line between what is real and what is imaginary, what is childish and what is adult. Its potential is limitless, but the actual book? It feels like a briefest glimpse at something that could be really special and the strongest thing about it is Laura Adamczyk’s narrative voice. Which means, even though this failed to materialise into something lofty and startling and fabulous, I still have high hopes for Laura Adamczyk’s future work. She’s definitely one to keep an eye on.

Laura Adamczyk’s Hardly Children is a collection of uncomfortable moments – stories that aim to disquiet and sometimes even hit the mark. Well, they approach the mark, can see the mark, maybe even brush against the mark at their height, but never firmly hold the mark head on. You’ll feel the effects of these stories around the edges of your reader periphery. Some may love this disquieting quality in this short story collection, but I found it to be dry and evasive.

I am not a believer that just because a work (or collection of works, in this case) is literary it can’t have soul as well. I firmly believe that the two can coexist, that they can complement and enhance each other. But Laura Adamczyk’s debut collection succeeded at “eerie” while never etching any significance and depth into the literary canon. There are moments here, but that’s it. “Wanted” and “Girls” get so close to the edge of a reader’s comfort level that they could have been thrilling. If. If Adamczyk had taken another step, colored the picture further out from the middle and closer to the boundary lines. If she’d really taken us there and completed the thought with gumption and confidence. “Girls” plays with the tricks our childhood memories can play on us – how we can never remember everything perfectly, especially if the event was traumatic, playing with the fact that we block out things that are too painful to remember head on. But, ultimately, this collection of stories always pulled back before the big whammy to what felt like nowhere.

Admirably, the writing style in Hardly Children manages to be dry and vague, daring yet always just shy of spoken malice or descriptions that draw a full picture of said malice. These stories are told with innuendo, which is a great tactic, but I was never in love with this particular execution.

In this collection, you’ll find a seemingly innocent hug between a child and a stranger, and you’ll detect a hint of malice around it. You’ll see three little girls who watch their father leave their mother and then have a shared experience that traumatizes them so much they can’t even agree, after the fact – years later – on what really happened that day. And you’ll find a city where children – well, “hardly children,” as the author describes, those that are too grown and “strutting” for their own good – get kidnapped, never to be seen again, and a man who suspends himself by hooks in his skin for artistic installations.

The imagery in this collection brushes up against “beautiful” at times. There’s a straight-faced lyricism to it that does have its appeal, but the stories themselves are dry, empty shells of narration, often leading nowhere, making me feel nothing – worse than nothing: bored. It’s the kind of writing that has talent but no soul, ideas without the full range of narrative motion needed to execute them. That was disappointing, because the idea for this collection is intriguing. But, as we know, intrigue can only lead the horse to water; it can’t make it drink. **

I am no stranger to eerie, dark tales, and am often drawn to them, though I could not get into this collection at all. I found myself skimming to find some thing to grab onto though to no avail. I am sure there is an audience for this, it's just not me.

These stories are not tidy, with satisfying resolutions. No. I think the word that comes to mind here is "discomfiting." Each story left me with a feeling of unease, which isn't to say they weren't well written. However, some left me hanging, which could be said of many, more conventional short stories. Those that come mid-way into a life and exit the same, presenting a slice of humanity. But so many of these felt summarily truncated, as if they were unfinished exercises. I did like some more than others, most notably Intermission, with its Italo Calvino- like twists of reality catching the reader continually off guard.

ten stories that capture that feeble moment of transition toward maturity, many stories have to do with children, others with "smaller, more naive adults," there are two meta-narrative stories, one on the “law of Chechov” and the mechanisms involved in the construction of fables, another reminds a bit a story with the same title by Robert Coover, on the way cinema is plotting our real lives. Poetic, rapid, incisive style that paints a passing world, to be captured before it evaporates. some uncertainty but overall very good.

https://americanorum.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/piccoli-adulti-infantili-hardly-children-di-laura-adamczyk/#more-360

An eerie and unsettling group of stories, each a little stranger than the previous, pretty much describes Laura Adamczyk’s HARDLY CHILDREN. Several of the situations are freakishly bizarre and there are betrayals, deception and darkness underlying every story. ( The visual I conjured of a man suspended 30 feet in the air by hooks piercing his skin was a little too graphic).

While the author is definitely a talented writer who is adept at “turning a phrase”, the subject matter here was a little too depressing for this readers taste.

Thank you to NetGalley for allowing me the opportunity to read and review this book.

Adamcyzk’s book is a collection of short stories that zoom into a moment in someone’s life and leaves the reader feeling that he/she is observing characters through a strange window. What you see is usually uncomfortable to witness, occasionally unsettling and not always resolved. My favorite story was the last one, The Black Box, which, among other things, deals with relationships, death, birth, etc. – all the big issues of a young woman’s life. What set this story above the others were some of the phrases and descriptions…..much to ponder and cherish.

Looking forward for more edginess and longer works from this author.
Recommended.

Laura Adamczyk's collection of short stories in 'Hardly Children' follow the common theme of uncomfortable moments that many people hate discussing. Missing parents, unrequited love, death, and loss are some of these moments that could happen to anyone, making them even more terrifying. While some of the stories were difficult to get through, many of them left quite an impression. I have a feeling that these are the types of stories that I will be thinking about months from now.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advance readers copy.

Brash and unnerving, all of the stories in this collection hit the reader square between the eyes. The creep factor is deliciously high, especially in those stories dealing with childhood. The author explores the boundaries (and lack thereof) between childhood and adulthood with a stunning deftness. Her metaphors both large and small work well. A man working as a prop in an art installation hangs from his skin on hooks above the crowd; when a family revelation is unveiled, he struggles with his new sense of self before he can literally and metaphorically come down from his tenderhooks. Small observations strike an equally sublime note: “my laughter came up like seltzer”. Haunting and revelatory, I highly recommend.

'How strange when strangers tried to step inside of you, I thought. Like when men in rags announced themselves to a train car, telling everyone about their lives, their current states of disrepair and what they wanted, needed, God Bless, from everyone, which somehow included you, and you kept your head down, reading the same sentence again and again, never quite taking hold of it, and the harder your tried, the more the men’s voices got in your ear, the more like they were speaking only to you.'

These stories are intense and unsettling. Children stretching into the eerie, harshly brutal light of adulthood as the sisters in Girls deal with their father leaving, and their mother now the head of the house. Their Saturdays spent exploring the series of rooms upstairs of their great-grandmother’s big rambling house while their mother worked, as if entering a strange world unsupervised, where their imaginations could run free. But one day, a door to the room they never entered is cracked and there they come across a very real adult. When the man says their names ‘like a little song’, it feels like an omen. Is the memory real? In Too Much A Child, an old man tells of the era when children were disappearing, just being taking if someone had a mind to take. It is happening again, what is the logic, are ‘bad’ children being weeded out of the good? So begins the marching, but our narrator doesn’t really want to become one with many, despite the injustice. It hints at the ways we are immune to horror, being past a certain age (in the story) but could as easily translate as being a different sex, or out of the time period so safe from history or simply one’s ethnicity if you boil it down. We can be the ones who are safe and look away or we can see.

A man named Adam becomes a part of an art installation where he is suspended by hooks, but the hooks of truth sink into him when his father divulges the long-held secret of his origins. Will he ever ‘come down’ and own this new version of his life? Is it easier for Adam, or any of us, to just remain floating in the before? Must we confront the after? Do things really ever have to change? Much like the furniture in the installation, nothing fits the same after it’s been rearranged.

My favorite, the one that horrified me the most is Danny Girl. It is the whisper of the dangers that always lurk for young girls that made this one stand out. The dreadful ending shook me. Being a young girl can feel so dumb when you don’t know what you should. Being a girl is always full of threats. Girls come to terrible ends, sometimes at their own hands too, sometimes by accident.

Children and adults may be one in the same as in this collection full of characters who have slipped between the cracks, existing in a place where they’ve yet to embrace the world of adults, but do we ever? People abandon responsibilities or reconfigure their futures, break up their family, or start a new one. Whether its sisters needing each other when life just keeps going wrong, and using pieces of hair to start messages to begin meaningful conversations, or a woman dating a nice virginal boy who isn’t enough for her appetite, every story engages the reader. The writing is clever, painting feelings with sentences “my laughter comes up like seltzer” and “we released each other, our faces smeared with time and truth.” I feel like I need to read a novel by Laura Adamczyk, she visits the places in her writing where my mind often meanders. A solid collection! Can’t wait for a novel!

Publication Date: November 20, 2018

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

FSG Originals

An eerie, haunting collection of short stories. I never knew which direction each story was going, sometimes I didn't know what the story was about at the beginning, which only made me want to read more. Laura Adamczyk is a masterful writer and I thoroughly enjoyed reading her work.

I enjoyed this collection of stories. Its very strange and so very different.. It did take me a bit longer to get into. I would read some of this book then read on another I( was reading. I did get through it.

This book is interesting, but some of the stories are better than others. I’m not a fan of the current trend of short stories ending rather abruptly at the peak of action or just as things started to get interesting, and unfortunately this book is very much a part of that trend. To be fair, that style works in favor of some of the stories in this collection and this genre, but for most it just leaves the reader disappointed. It is very successful at creating an eerie mood.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley. This collection of short stories is definitely different. They have an eerie feel to them and they are not always clear about what is happening. Some stories are not really wrapped up neatly. If you like happy stories with a clear beginning and end, this is not the book for you. If you want stories that leave you a little haunted and make you think then pick up a copy of this book.