~book~ Blueprints for Building Better Girls

Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction by Elissa Schappell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If I had to describe this book in five words it would be: beautiful, heart wrenching, real, haunting. It has been a long time since I couldn't put a book down without great difficulty. Schappell has written a series of short stories that is so intimately relatable that it's impossible to feel for these girls.
There are some reviewers who were bemoaning and wanting to know where the "strong" women were in this anthology and the point of this was that these were not strong women. They were real broken women who had real broken things happen to them. These are the thoughts that anyone whose ever been outcasted by peers or their own experiences are afraid to voice. These are not women who make great decisions, but make the best decisions they can to cope with what they're given.
This is something short of a novel and something more than a short story collection. Characters are reintroduced and experiences are shared from different perspectives. The first story and the last are told by the same woman, at the beginning and end of an evolution. It ties the interconnected stories up in a neat little bow.
I'm not going to lie and say that I didn't see myself in several of these characters, but the way she writes about how mothers' feel in the face of their children's destruction was perhaps the most affecting. My children are still young enough that it's not something I deal with yet, but someday they will break my heart and that is the potential this collection made me feel.
If there was only one story you read in this anthology it would be "The Joy of Cooking". It encompasses how difficult mother/daughter relationships are from both ends. No matter how perfect they may look from the outside. "On her first birthday I made my baby girl a carrot cake and she fed herself with her fist. She squealed with delight. I thought: So, this is love." What more perfect thought is there from a mother looking back on a daughter whose struggled with anorexia her entire life?

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