Talk of the Nation/May 31, 2006
Summer Reading List

CONAN: All right. Let's see if we can get one recommendation from each of our - our reviewers before we have to wind this up. Oscar Villalon in San Francisco.

Mr. VILLALON: I have one more, one more I'd like to recommend. It's Elizabeth McKenzie's Stop That Girl. It's very - it's extremely funny. It's essentially a bunch of stories about an 8-year-old girl growing up in Southern California, and how all the sort of zany, for lack of a better word, things that happen to her as she gets older. Particularly just trying to fit in, her family, she feels sort of a misfit. She has this grandmother who's a doctor, Dr. Frost, who also seems to be a little bit out of her mind. She's kind of like Holly Golightly at 70, and keeps dragging her out of her normal existence and putting her in very awkward situations. I think people may really, really dig that one for the summer. Again, it's one of very few things I've read that made me laugh out loud. You know, there's a lot of things you read that are somewhat funny, you kind of, you know, snicker a little bit, but start cracking up like a madman on the bus and people look at you!

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Elizabeth McKenzie's Stop That Girl is a series of chronological stories that, taken together, uncover the life story of Ann Ransom, a native Californian who moves from childhood to adulthood with poise, intelligence, and humor. The state of California itself serves as an important supporting character, helping to keep Ann rooted in time and space as she moves through each chapter of her life.

While each story is unique in its own right, McKenzie's lyrical style makes it easy to string each episode together to form the consistent thread of Ann's life. In one of the early stories, ten-year-old Ann attends a neighborhood party on her own, apologizing to the host for her parents's absence while attempting to fulfill the family's social obligations with the grace of someone well beyond her years. ("I make it my business to look as enterprising ad possible, a team player, someone you can count on, someone who never lets you down...") As she gets older, Ann continues to play the role of "normal one" in a family of eccentric personalities, while simultaneously attempting to forge her own identity as a young woman. In one climatic story, Ann's grandmother pays her a visit at UC Santa Cruz on the same day as a monumental appearance by Allen Ginsberg. What follows is a car chase that culminates in a showdown between Ann, her boyfriend, and her grandmother that perfectly illustrates the push-pull dynamic which seems to define Ann's life.

For Ann, each step forward brings with it a reminder of a past that she doesn't necessarily want to forget. It is this haunting inability to escape her past, to in fact embrace her past in order to move on, that make Ann such an endearing character and her creator such a gifted storyteller.
--Gisele Toueg

"A book I always recommend is Stop That Girl by Elizabeth McKenzie. It's a book of short stories set in Los Angeles...the book is serious and sad at the same time. It's a stunning work about what is lost and broken in families."
--Caitlin Flanagan

Click here to hear Stop That Girl performed at Stories on Stage in Chicago:
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Program_sos.aspx?episode=10825

Click here to read the Reader's Circle discussion questions

Click here to hear Elizabeth read Stop That Girl (from Best American Nonrequired Reading (Audio CD)

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Stop That Girl
Elizabeth McKenzie

Stop That Girl
Written by Elizabeth Mckenzie
Category: Fiction
Publisher: Random House
Format: Trade Hardcover, 224 pages
ISBN: 1400062241
Pub Date: February 15, 2005
Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
ISBN: 0-8129-7228-7
Pub Date: April 11, 2006