Breaking Points

by Chelsea Stickle

In thirteen slick, innovative, and gut-wrenching flashes, the young women and girls in Breaking Points, the debut chapbook from Chelsea Stickle, hit the walls around them - walls constructed by family, friends, significant others, and insidious cultural perils. Stranger danger doesn't disappear when you start wearing a push-up bra, notes one of Stickle's pre-teen narrators when confronted by a leering threat that will forever sever her path from that of her best friend. In How to Make Stock with Thanksgiving Leftovers, a queer young woman takes us through a wry recipe for boiling turkey stock and raging against small-minded relatives and the traumas they inflict.

Written in the style of a classic glossy magazine personality quiz, How Mature Are You?: A Quiz provides whip-smart A, B, C responses to situations such as: When that bitch in your book club calls you a space cadet then furnishes the reader with irreverent, pull-no-punches results. This is a collection as darkly humorous as it is heartbreaking and disquieting. Within Stickle's thirteen walled worlds, some will break, some adapt, and others soar. Pushed to the breaking point, none escape unscathed.

Genres: Short Stories, Poetry

44 pages, Paperback

Published October 26, 2021

About the author

Chelsea Stickle is the author of the flash fiction chapbooks Everything's Changing (Thirty West Publishing, January 2023) and Breaking Points (Black Lawrence Press, 2021). Her stories appear in CRAFT, Chestnut Review, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and others. Her micros have been selected for Best Microfiction 2021 and the Wigleaf Top 50 in 2022. She's been nominated for Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and the Pushcart Prize. She lives in Annapolis, MD with her black rabbit George and a forest of houseplants.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a chapbook of thirteen flash stories, all having to do with the “breaking points” of young women, though no story is titled as such. Unlike the more experimental and surreal stories of Stickle’s more recent chapbook, Everything's Changing, these stories are grounded in reality. However, a few do employ different forms—a flow chart, a magazine quiz, and a recipe. The recipe-story may be my favorite of the bunch, with its fuming young woman making stock from turkey bones, as her judgmental, unaccepting family criticizes her life.

3.5

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoughts soon.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Breaking Points in one sitting. It is short and punchy. I loved the writing style. The writer uses no extra words without being sparse. Really works for me. I'll keep an eye for future publications.

[Tommy Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stickle writes in your face characters who like to yell and cuss and love and hate, and try to figure out why people can’t behave in predictable ways! This is fierce flash with some many takeaway lines that you’ll be left breathless!

[J.L. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this debut chapbook to support my friend in some small fragment of the way she has supported my writing for years. It then took me an embarrassingly long time to read. Then, when I meant to treat myself to these bits of flash in between working on another project, I found myself devouring it in a single sitting instead. I even happily re-read the few pieces I had previously read online when they were originally published.

I might know the author, but I know her through her writing (both as a beta reader and via social media) more than I know her through personal interaction. I adore her either way, but that knowledge made reading these flash fiction pieces even more intriguing. There’s a fine line between autobiographical, dramatization, and catastrophizing in fiction that is so rooted in reality. Even when I think I might be able to predict where each of these stories falls on that scale, Stickle is a person of such layers that I’m probably wrong even in the instances that I’m right.

Since I’m not a regular flash reader and I also adore the nontraditional, I’ll admit that my favorites in this collection are the ones with unique formatting. “Quiz: How Mature Are You?” amused me, and “Through Rose-Colored Glasses” dragged me on an unexpected and inescapable journey (despite the numerous options).

“What the Detectives Found in Her Abandoned Car” is an entire suspense novel in a single breath and packs a punch as the opener. Read it again when you’ve finished the rest of the collection because it almost serves as both prologue and epilogue for all of the women in these pieces.

Overall, I know I will always be hungry for more of Stickle’s words because she is so sparing with them in this chosen medium, but every bite is nuanced and worth more than I bargained for.

Disclaimer: I purchased a hardcopy version of this chapbook for full price. I am friends with the author, who did not ask me to review this book.

[Angela Joynes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breaking Points is a wonderfully creative collection of short stories, and a study in the art of short fiction writing. I won’t spoil the surprise for future readers, but I doubt you’ve EVER seen a piece like “Through Rose-Colored Glasses.” So inventive and fun!

From page 1 which begins with a postpartum mother and an abandoned car, I felt the fevered poignancy of this author’s insight. I was moved by each story. And at the very end when Chelsea asks, “Can you see me now?” I sighed with satisfaction and went right back to page 1 again!

[Allison Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stickle’s stories are realistic moments that you’ve felt or, once you read them, make them feel like your own memories. Her writing is accessible and beautiful, always ending on a final note that keeps the story resonating in your mind long after you close the book. Along with narrative flash fiction are hermit crab pieces told as a flow chart and a quiz, which add another layer of story to the words you read.

[Dorothy Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved Chelsea Stickle's BREAKING POINTS, each story a sharp, shiny gem. This gorgeous little volume is packed to bursting with inventive, unique stories that play with form and narrative without compromising tension and character. Stickle's characters inhabit dangerous, unpredictable worlds that Stickle narrates with wicked skill.

[Keith Powell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breaking Points is a tight 46-pages of women on the edge. Veins of dispassionate cruelty and loneliness connect flash works of "true" crime, parental torture, and sepia-tinged heartache. It's a remarkable chapbook both in terms of economy and range.

[Caelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A joy to see Chelsea’s writing collected. Favorite stories: “Heirloom Seed Propagation” and “If You Want It Bad Enough”

[Jennifer Pullen · Rating 5 out of 5]

An engaging chapbook with innovator use of form, where the stories, while not precisely interconnected, build off each other so that each accretes meaning from the one before.

[Gregory Ashe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful stories. Very much enjoyed reading

[Shareen Murayama · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bold. Beautiful.

[Josh Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stare into the mirror with plenty of laughs and memories mixed inside. Some stories utilizes specific forms which showcase Stickle’s critical approach to flash. A solid flash fiction chapbook.

[Patience · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a great read throughout. Powerful, funny, disturbing, real. The menace of 'Coming of Age' and the hysteria/triumph of 'If you want it bad enough' will stay with me. An artist to watch!

[V · Rating 1 out of 5]

Even though Twitter never appears in the book, it reads like the writer spends too much time on Twitter. These stories are meanspirited and shallow. Every character is either an innocent victim or a heartless oppressor. The worst was the story "Heirloom Seed Propagation" which is about a girl's relationship with her grandmother. Every scene was about some slight the grandmother committed against the girl, some sexist or fatphobic. When the grandmother dies, the girl is happy, and the reader never gains a deeper understanding of either character. We don't learn why the grandmother became such a hardened woman, and the narrator has no curiosity about someone different than herself. Literature is supposed to expand your world, not shrink it.