Hot Little Hands, the debut short story collection from Abigail Ulman, concerns young women and girls at tipping points. In "Same Old Same As," Ramona struggles to discern whether she experienced what her therapist vaguely refers to as "abuse." In "Chagall's Wife," Sascha flirts with her lonely teacher; in "The Pretty One," Claire near-obsessively pursues a beautiful, much younger man. The stories are often about either clinging desperately to youth or falling into maturity, although their themes are subtle and hidden beneath slice-of-life exteriors. The vague melancholy of growing up has hardly gone unexamined in fiction, but Ulman's millennial take is genuinely insightful. She seems to have a particular grasp of the way technology and postindustrial society hurriedly rush girls out of childhood, and then trap women in an odd liminal state between adolescence and adulthood.
Ulman, an Australian, also has a soft spot for women caught between worlds--minorities, immigrants and expatriates. "Jewish History" features a young Russian girl struggling to fit her family's history of struggle into the accepted narrative of persecution shared by her Jewish Australian classmates. Another Russian protagonist in "Warm Ups"--the stories in the collection are very loosely interconnected--is a 13-year-old girl taking advantage of a gymnastics event to travel to the United States. Ulman portrays her characters as unknowingly determining their places in the world, and she manages to depict this process absent self-seriousness and with a healthy dose of wry humor. Hot Little Hands is the rare collection that portrays how life pivots around mundane moments as readily as earth-shaking events. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books