'Where The Wild Ladies Are' Is Perfect Halloween Reading
Aoko Matsuda's gently supernatural story collection — all about women who are something more than they seem — gets its unearthly feel not from jump scares, but from the quality of the writing.
In "Smartening Up," the first story in Aoko Matsuda's collection Where the, the narrator reflects on her dissatisfaction with the way she looks. She has too much body hair, she thinks, and that's why her boyfriend left her. In her estimation, the breakup "happened because my arms, my legs, and other parts of my body were not perfectly hairless — because I was an unkempt person who went about life as if there was nothing wrong with being hairy."
