Prepare Her: Stories [Paperback]

A collection of elegant, original, and moving stories with the lyrical brilliance and bite of Sylvia Plath set in a not-so bucolic Vermont, a land of antique stores, small towns, fading farms, and young women trying to figure out marriage, motherhood, sex and their own power (Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Almost Famous Women and Birds of a Lesser Paradise).

Prepare Her tells the stories of young women at the brink of discovering their own power. The crossroads in their lives are not always the obvious kind--divorce, motherhood, coming of age--but sometimes much more private and dramatic. Kitty discovers that her ex-boyfriend has committed a murder; Renee navigates a friendship with Arla, a Jehovah's Witness; Emi realizes that her boyfriend is fetishizing her mental illness; Petra acts recklessly when faced with a client with a gun; and Rachel must grapple with the reality of raising a daughter in a world that she, herself, is still terrified of.

Tempered by its rural and often haunting Vermont setting, this book explores the complexities of gender and power imbalances in a way that transforms normal life into something mysterious, uncharted, and sometimes bewildering. Through this lens, we can see the many subtle, yet staggering injustices endured by the women at the center of these stories, as well as identify what, or who might be responsible.“Dreamlike, atmospheric stories that revel in haunting, protracted tension . . . If art is control and precision, the unbridled life that inspires it is too sweeping and wild to be accurately captured. Yet Plunkett is a writer of such extraordinary power that she’s able to summon the unknowable chaos into a spellbinding story.” —Rachel Yoder, The New York Times Book Review

A sobering yet transfixing collection. —Lauren l3#