“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

“The girls and women in Aryn Kyle’s droll, astute story collection are apt to evaluate the social situation they find themselves in and calculate their actions based on what will gain them the most power or popularity.  They might sleep with a married man or a man their father’s age, if only out of boredom.  They might break up a couple or diss a downtrodden classmate.  If they are employed, they don’t like their jobs or don’t try very hard at them.  As the narrator of “A Lot Like Fun” discovers, she doesn’t have many useful “skills.” Their mothers are dead, disturbed, depressed or distant, like the reclusive mother in Kyle’s perceptive and sensitive debut novel The God of Animals...” (read full review)

—New West

“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

“Award-winning writer Aryn Kyle’s new tome of short stories, Boys and Girls Like You and Me, is a book about the rocky road of youth written for adults. Kyle won raves from critics with her coming-of-age debut novel The God of Animals and has seen her work run in “The Atlantic Monthly” and “The Best American Short Stories 2007” anthology, so you know girlfriend wields her pen like a weapon...” (read full review)

—Minnesota Daily

“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. In “Brides,” a teen appearing in a high-school production of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers gets used by both the ruthless leading lady and the drama teacher besotted with her. “Allegiance” features a young British-born girl who, after moving to an American suburb with her troubled parents, gets an unforgettable lesson in the costs—and rewards—of becoming a mean girl. Self-destruction, too, has its place in Kyle’s world as Lilly, the bright but unhappy young woman at the center of “Company of Strangers,” exemplifies. On the day her father dies, she takes her brother’s children to a theme restaurant and ends up in a kinky clinch with their pirate-costumed waiter, while the kids are in the next room. There is also the hard-drinking underachiever of the title story who hides out in a dead-end town waiting for her married boyfriend to come visit, only to be shocked out of her lethargy by an unlikely friendship with her troubled teen neighbor. The most conventionally hopeful story is told from an adolescent boy’s point of view, as he comes of age (but not like that) during an incredibly awkward cruise vacation in “Captain’s Club.” 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

“Kyle, whose first novel, The God of Animals (2007), was selected as an Alex Award winner, turns her creative energy and dark imagination to shorter fiction in her second book, producing 11 stories that are irresistibly readable in the same way that a goiter or a carbuncle demands careful scrutiny. The girls, young women, and, in one case, 12-year-old boy who serve as protagonists are or soon will be unrelievedly miserable, disappointed by life, betrayed by love, and convinced—like Lilly in “Company of Strangers”—that they they will “die horribly.” 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.  In “Nine,” the young protagonist tells elaborate lies to deflect the pain of her mother’s absence, though her attempts at befriending her father’s new girlfriend go terribly awry.  “Allegiance” depicts the ruthless extent the new girl will go to get invited to a sleepover party held by the popular girls, especially as her mother offers suggestions for tormenting the weak.  Similarly, in “Brides,” the new girl in the high school play learns how to ingratiate herself with the lead and the pervy theater teacher.  Meanwhile, dallying with married men only brings grief to smart women, as in “Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore” and the moving title story.  There’s no shortage of heartache, and Kyle’s varied approaches to it consistently reveals new ways of feeling bad.”             

—Publishers Weekly