Stop That Girl

From the first story of Elizabeth McKenzie's beguiling debut collection, we are drawn into the offbeat worldview of sharp-eyed, intrepid Ann Ransom. "Stop That Girl" chronicles Ann's colorful coming-of-age travails, from her childhood in a disjointed family through her tender adolescence and beyond.

In the captivating title story, our eight-year-old heroine is sent by her pregnant mother on a whirlwind jaunt to Europe with her iconoclast grandmother—known even to her family as Dr. Frost—and comes home to find her family completely reconfigured. In "SOS," Dr. Frost returns to haunt Ann in college, her visit colliding with a famous poet's appearance on campus. "We Know Where We Are, But Not Why" is set during a summer at the Grand Canyon and contrasts Ann's angst-ridden yearning for a philosophical schoolmate back home to her mother's happier pursuits of a lively Australian activist.

Along the way, Ann discovers the absurdities that lurk around every corner of a young woman's life, by way of oafish neighbors, overzealous boyfriends, prurient vegetable salesmen, and sour landlords.

In these keenly funny, highly original stories, Ann and the people around her are forced to reassess their complex relationships and, along the way, find happiness on the brink of calamity. "Stop That Girl" is a brilliant examination of the exigencies of love and the fragile fabric of family, and heralds the emergence of a remarkable new voice in fiction.