Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls

Reviews

‘I find myself haunted by this innocent, menacing, blackly funny and fabulous book. Anne Casey-Hardy’s writing hums with a dangerous, coiled energy in sly, ghostly stories of girls and women striking back, lying low, busting out, triumphing even while sinking. Casey-Hardy is a raw, rare talent with an unforgettable voice.’ 'Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls buzzes with energy. Anne Casey-Hardy is a wonderful fiction writer. Her characters are brave and full of soul. In mapping the lives and the places where stories thrive, Casey-Hardy also touches our hearts. Such a gift.' ‘Casey-Hardy's stories cast a deep and unusual spell. Her collection is sharp, irreverent, and unexpectedly funny. I loved it.’  ‘Electric, irreverent, haunting, heart-breaking – Anne Casey-Hardy's Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls is one of the best short story collections you'll ever read. An exceptional debut from a hugely talented writer.’ ‘You’ll be transfixed by the misadventures of Casey-Hardy's dangerously innocent heroines. Her fractured fairytales are like nothing you’ve come across before: unnerving, brilliant, hilarious, heart-stirring.’  ‘I love these stories, and Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls will take centre stage on my bookshelf. They’re deep and dark, but also uproariously funny, and never anything but hopeful. Each girl or woman in these stories faces the reader and tells the truth, and I can’t ask for more than that. Cross the precision and absurdity of George Saunders with the searching intelligence of Angela Carter, and add the technical brilliance of Alice Munro, and you might have some idea of what Anne can do, but in fact her writing is wholly her own, and wholly original. Australian literature will be very much richer for her Cautionary Tales! ‘I love these fierce, wild girls and the off-kilter troubles they find themselves in. Anne Casey-Hardy creates slightly surrealist worlds full of emphatically true details: risks we've all taken, worries we've all had, rules we wish we'd broken. These are stories laced through with menace and joy, and Casey-Hardy has an eye that slices to the bone of what it is to be a girl in this world.’ ‘Delightfully surprising, the stories in this collection switch between stark realism and strangeness in the best of ways. Suffused with wry humour, and deftly drawn characters, Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls delivers a kaleidoscopic navigation of the self-consciousness, escapism, and fractured thinking that attends life’s transformative experiences. These stories live and breathe on the cusps of life and the transitions we chart as we pass through and beyond it.’ 'What a thrill it is to find a truly distinctive new voice. Cautionary Tales captures the essence of girlhood: raw, fierce, fearless, and crackling with energy and desire. An impressive and inspiring work of fiction.' Expand reviews