Not Waving

by Kat Meads

The first thing one notices about these stories may well be the typography. Rest assured: though Kat Meads employs stylistic fireworks, she does not do so at the expense of character or emotion. Rather, her stylistic moves bolster emotion, for they provide the ironic removal Meads wants to study her characters and their situations. Situations? How about a drunken bus driver and a caroming bus ride interrupting your mother’s grousing? How about an over-sexed mother eyeing your teenaged boyfriend? How about being stranded on an island during your honeymoon—and during an incidental hurricane? Or pushing your mid-morning maid cart in to clean a motel room and finding a corpse? Meads writes so surely, so calmly that she turns the oddball into the believable, and just when you settle into feeling that same believable slipping into everyday humdrum, Meads slams the entire show into amazing insights about what we blithely dare to label “everyday humdrum.” Everyday? Humdrum? Each and every day gives us the whole kit and caboodle of life’s amazement—the whole Kat and Caboodle, we should write.

214 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001