Monthly reviews of books written by Indiana authors are made possible by the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards and Indiana Humanities. Opinions expressed in this review are solely those of the reviewer, not any affiliated entity.
Téa Franco has created wonderfully rich worlds inside her three-part collection of short stories, You Could Be That Kind of Girl. Characters navigate complicated family tensions, addiction, queer isolation, insecurity, and grief in stories that are alive with magical realism and vivid imagery. Franco has so beautifully captured the feeling of making sense through imagination, where a horde of greedy bugs can represent the intangible shame of disordered eating, and a starving vampire can embody the trapped experiences of marginalization and poverty. Each story feels like its own vast universe that lives beyond the page, and the narrators all seem like someone you could meet as they move through their universe with curiosity, resentment, confusion, loneliness, and affection.
Part of what makes this book and its characters come alive is the way Franco writes relationships. Throughout the stories, we see mothers struggling to communicate with their daughters, abuelas overcoming their reservations to be supportive, and lovers who aren’t sure what they want from each other. These interactions feel delightfully true to life in their imperfections, miscommunications, and tenderness. The spaces between what characters say and don’t say to each other, conclude or walk away without answering, reveal or allow to remain unknown, hold entire lifetimes that Téa Franco balances masterfully on the page.
One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the range of voices and tones. Franco moves seamlessly from stories with young narrators who cling to concrete details to understand nuances beyond their years, to adult women whose reflections reveal full inner lives. Likewise, the prose in this collection shifts from stark to lyrical, from straightforward to luxurious, from heartbreaking to hilarious. We chase turtles in staccato sentences when speed is what’s needed, and linger on the swirling yarn patterns of a two-headed crochet dog when the goal is to understand the intricate loneliness of a famously eccentric musician seeking community. I found myself laughing at the absurd at the same time that it clutched my heart.
My favorite paragraph in my favorite story in the book begins, “I wondered if the distempered raccoon had a family. Some days I imagined it was a mother—one of those really good ones who spent hours nuzzling through garbage to get her kids some green-fuzz covered orange peels, their favorite snack.” To me, this crystallized the author’s way of showing the world in endless fantastical possibilities, where narrators’ imaginative observations are steered by their desires, by longing for their mothers or to feel loved. Where the details we land on reveal a bottomless well of wanting. This aching sense of seeing and searching propelled me through the entire book in a single sitting and then sent me back for more.
Téa Franco is a writer based in Indianapolis. She has fiction, poetry, and non-fiction published in Barrelhouse Magazine, Barren Magazine, Foglifter Press, and others. She co-edited Kiss Your Darlings: A Taylor Swift Anthology and teaches creative writing workshops. She is currently working on her first novel and received a travel grant from the Central Indiana Community Foundation to conduct research in Puerto Rico, where her family is from.
Brittany Means was born dead and then lived for a while in a car and then later in a huge black barn out in the cornfields of rural Indiana. A graduate of Ball State University and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, her debut memoir, Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways, earned a Kirkus starred review and was picked as a Best Book of Fall 2023 by PEOPLE magazine. Currently, Means lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she keeps chickens, edits, and watches many many horror movies.
