Eat Your Heart Out

by Katie Boland

With unsentimental prose and ironic dialogue, Katie Boland brings to life a variety of characters who all have one thing in common—a need for something more. A literary debut by a refreshing new voice in fiction, the stories in Eat Your Heart Out are about the haunted and heartbroken, about dreamers, losers and love-lost souls. From a sixteen-year-old autistic savant whos sleeping with his best friends mother, to a tattooed beauty coming to terms with an alcoholic parent, to a newspaper man forever changed by a tender drifter, to a grief counsellor trying to reconcile her own tragic loss, the stories examine the fragility of human relationships and why people love the way they do. Bold, poignant and affecting, Eat Your Heart Out is a clear-eyed exploration of youth, life, love, sex, and death.

Genres: Short Stories, Canada

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 5, 2013

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

I always struggle to give star ratings to story collections - very few are perfect, most containing some excellent stories and some less so. At the time of writing 'Eat Your Heart Out' has only two ratings on Goodreads, both five stars, which ought to bode well. Alas, both of those ratings come from employees of the publisher (one of whom is name-checked in the book's acknowledgments), and are to my mind rather misleading. The collection has two stand-out stories ('Saturday' and 'Mama' which are both quite powerful and justify buying the book) and a couple of okay ones (I quite enjoyed 'Swelter' and 'Gun Shy') but the rest are either forgettable or misjudged. As was noted in a review in Quill & Quire, Boland's best stories are those written in the third person - a lot of her first person stories seem to be written as male characters which is a mistake as she never quite pulls it off.
Reading this collection I often wondered where the editor was in the process - we have odd shifts in point of view, sentences that change tense halfway through, and far too many drunken, solipsistic young women (boring in real life, especially tedious in fiction), and stories that seem to fizzle out rather than end. 'The Falling Action', a love story narrated by a member of the IRA, is easily the weakest here - a 'twist' that is revealed in the middle of the story rather than the end could have been used in a far more interesting way, the Oirish never rings true, and there are a couple of jarring Americanisms.
Her website notes she is currently working on a novel and there is certainly enough promise shown in this collection to suggest the novel will be worth picking up.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't really sure how to rate this book. I kind of like happily ever after kind of stories because they tend to lead me to see a higher path. But these stories weren't happily ever after. Sad, regretful, remorseful, longing. And yet I couldn't put the book down. While the characters felt a little two dimensional the dimensions of their feelings and how they handle their relationships felt real. They felt like something I could relate to in myself or people I've cared about and maybe the happily ever after part is that I can look at myself and others with a renewed sense of compassion and connection in a common experience.

[Julienne]

Watch for my upcoming review in The Winnipeg Review online.