On the third Wednesday, January 19 at 1:00, a special meeting of the Book Group will be held on Zoom. The book we will be discussing is Prepare Her, a book of short stories by Bennington author Genevieve Plunkett. The book came out last summer and has received positive reviews by sources such as the New York Times Book Review.

The Zoom link is Bit.ly/AAUWBennProgram 

The author will be joining us, so we encourage everyone to attend and invite other members. If you can’t read the whole book because of the late notice, Genevieve has suggested that you try to read the first of the short stories and the the last one, the title story. She welcomes your questions!

Prepare Her is available at the Bennington Bookshop, Northshire Bookstore (Manchester and Saratoga), the Williams College Bookstore, and Battenkill Books in Cambridge, if people still need to get it. There are also copies at the Bennington Free Library and the McCullough Library in North Bennington. Most Barnes and Noble locations carry it in the store. It is also available on Kindle and Nook.

The author suggests that attendees read the first story and the last story and anything that they have time for in-between. She is open to all kinds of questions: about the writing process, about the stories themselves, about being a writer in Vermont, a woman writer, writing while mothering, the themes of the book. Anything!  She will read for about ten minutes before she takes questions.

 Plunkett’s title [Prepare Her] comes from a story in which the protagonist, Rachel, hears the critical voices of her mother and her ex-husband playing in her head as she’s struggling with a willfully constipated daughter. “You have failed to prepare her,” the voices say, meaning Rachel hasn’t taught her daughter enough about her body. “Prepare her. It means more than she wants it to. She is on the verge of something terrible, something unspeakable.” The “unspeakable” — the threat of sexual maturity and of men’s looming desire — pervades the book.

In the opening story of this uncanny debut, Allison, a recently separated violist, retreats to her mother’s house with her young son. Her in-laws have been icy, her husband mediocre and her own musical aspirations left behind. “And then one day,” Plunkett writes, “a change occurred, marked by a dream. It was one of those dreams where very little happens, but something is injected under the surface, into the commotion of life.” The author may as well be describing her own aesthetic: dreamlike, atmospheric stories that revel in haunting, protracted tension.

Plunkett’s most magical pieces call to mind Shirley Jackson’s domestic literary horror, but weirder. In “Schematic,” a young boy is left to confront his grandmother’s death alone and, in his terror, meets with a troubling doppelgänger he can’t understand. In “A Bone for Christmas,” Petra, a social worker, must contend with a threatening, gun-wielding client. Uncertain as to what exactly happens to her, we are left instead with her young son and the “pulsing nothingness in his head.” In “Gorgon,” the narrator’s search for a disembodied head proves a vivid metaphor for the gruesomeness of her adolescent sexual awakening.

Before the final, title story’s fittingly chilling end, Rachel lapses into lyric meditation on a woodland walk: “Nature has no style, no predictable emotional cues. … A tree made into a chair, Rachel thinks, can bring such precise, harmonious longing, but a tree when it is just a tree demands something unbridled, rhapsodic.” If art is control and precision, the unbridled life that inspires it is too sweeping and wild to be accurately captured. Yet Plunkett is a writer of such extraordinary power that she’s able to summon the unknowable chaos into spellbinding story.

–Rachel Yoder is the author of “Nightbitch.”

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