PRAISE FOR

BOYS AND GIRLS LIKE YOU AND ME

“Move over, Holden Caulfield: Teenage alienation has a new, female voice. No one captures millennial adolescence quite like Aryn Kyle, whose best-selling debut novel, The God of Animals, found a stealthy power in a teenager’s coming-of-age on a Colorado ranch encroached by development. Her new story collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me (Scribner), features young women making their way in an America of stultifying suburban sameness—strip shopping malls, generically named apartment complexes—who go to ruthless lengths to get what they want, sleeping with married men and betraying everyone, most of all themselves. Kyle, a wonderfully mordant and unshowy writer who clearly remembers what it’s like to be simultaneously too young to know better and wise beyond one’s years, gives voice to their floating malaise...” (read full review)

—Vogue

“A terrifically jittery, supercharged energy propels Aryn Kyle’s story collection, Boys and Girls Like You and Me (Scribner), the follow-up to her best-selling debut novel, The God of Animals. Kyle’s 11 stories feature young women who seem smarter or savvier or sounder than the circumstances in which they find themselves, but who then discover something of value in their reduced states that enables them to move on…not necessarily upward, but onward. In Kyle’s universe of female trials, hard times, trickery, and trouble, that latter virtue is—hands down—the more essential, life-enhancing goal...” (read full review)

—Elle

“...It is the characters in Kyle’s work that make these stories unforgettable. She has truly gone above and beyond in creating characters that readers will not only respond to but relate to and even be shocked by. Thus her new book is impossible to put down. Much like The God of Animals, it is in many ways breathtaking in its beauty and honesty. Kyle’s short story “Femme” even goes so far to demonstrate the deep understanding the author has for the relationships frequently formed between women and the trust boundaries often forged and broken. She is an artist of words, but also an observer of life whose accounts will leave readers wanting more...” (read full review)

—New York Journal of Books

“These whip-smart stories by Aryn Kyle leave a distinct tang of astringency. The collection opens with the powerful narrative of a high school girl who joins the drama club and falls into the orbit of its coldly manipulative prima donna...” (read full review)

—The Boston Globe

“What Kyle does best--and, lucky for her readers, frequently--is parachute into ordinary miserable lives and use her extraordinary talent to render them unforgettable.” (read full review)

—The Miami Herald

“It is evident that the talented Aryn Kyle still remembers what it is like to be a girl. In her superb debut, The God of Animals, Kyle illuminated the life of twelve-year old Alice Winston as she grows up on a horse farm...Kyle’s latest work is a collection of short stories—BOYS AND GIRLS LIKE YOU AND ME—and here too she sheds light on the many tribulations (and joys) of girlhood. What’s more she shows how the girls we read about, grow up to be the women we see around us...” (read full review)

—Mostly Fiction Book Review

“In this absolutely knockout collection, Kyle channels girls (and women) on the verge—of making big mistakes, tumbling into the wrong kind of love, and reevaluating everything they ever thought they knew about themselves and the world. Brilliantly funny and moving, Kyle shocks and surprises in a voice that’s indelibly her own. Loved, loved, loved this book.”

—Caroline Leavitt, author of Girls in Trouble

“By turns mordant and tender, often comic, always precise, these beautifully written stories go to the heart of the oddity of what we call ordinary life. Kyle succeeds in telling bitter truths about her characters—both the sinning and the sinned against—without succumbing to bitterness herself. Hope and affection for our sad bruised world shine through.”

—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind

“The complex emotional lives of women and girls are explored in this riveting collection.  Betrayal as the weapon of choice for the female of the species is a recurring theme in these 11 free-standing stories...Throughout, Kyle (The God of Animals, 2007) shows a talent for exposing the hurt at the heart of our worst impulses. And she doesn’t judge. Her haunting characters, with their vulnerability and cruelty, live on in the imagination.  A strange, darkly humorous trip into the female psyche.”

—Kirkus

“As she did in her novel, Kyle reinforces the bleakness of mood and tone with loving descriptions of unsavory settings (a school is “a dirty scab of a place”; skies are “the color of concrete”; and air smells like “grease and diesel fumes”). There is an almost perverse artistry at work here, however, and at least two of the stories—“Nine” and “A Lot like Fun”—are near-perfect exercises in persuading readers that the hallmark of human nature is imperfectability and that truth is its ultimate falsehood.”

—Booklist

“VERDICT: Kyle has written an engaging collection of tales. Fans of Lorrie Moore or Alice Munro's short stories will find much to appreciate in these moments of female experience.”

—Library Journal

“This sure-to-please collection by Kyle probes the frequently wrongheaded choices girls and young women make to feel happy and loved.  Girls growing up with father whose wives have vanished, girls perilously desirous of acceptance, young women enthralled by unsuitable men: these are the characters inhabiting Kyle’s low-key tales...There’s no shortage of heartache, and Kyle’s varied approaches to it consistently reveals new ways of feeling bad.”             

—Publishers Weekly