Anything Boys Can Do

By Angie Abdou

Angie Abdou_s short story debut is a sassy collection about likeable women running wild. In an irreverent vivisection of cultural myths of gender such as "women are born nurturers" or "men are inherently more aggressive", Abdou reveals the silent contracts that lie at the underbelly of polished marriages, platonic friendships, barroom flirtations and not-so-meaningless sex.
Abdou_s characters have an easy honesty, a dirty-kneed grace that reminds us of girls who climbed trees and pulled the wings off butterflies. Now grown up, they offer biting and insouciant revelations into sexual stereotypes, fear of intimacy, and anger management. Abdou's stories brim with the emotional, moral and social conundrum of living GAP commercial feminism on a thrift store budget, and provide a deliciously self-effacing joyride through the girl slums of Boystown.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1897235127
• ISBN13: 9781897235126
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Thistledown Press
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Not your average chick lit book - Anything Boys Can Do

ANYTHING BOYS CAN DO by Angie Abdou - Anything Boys Can Do is a collection of twelve short stories in which young women question traditional limitations, including monogamy. The women protagonists, though not always ideals that we would aspire to, are real, smart, and funny. Abdou avoids romanticizing heterosexual love and instead maintains a hilariously unromantic and refreshingly bitter tone throughout all of her characters' sexploits. She manages to discuss female sexuality without using derogatory terms such as tart, slut, whore. Her characters are the liberated women of a post-feminist age. But Abdou does not idealize these women or the successes of feminism either -- her female characters are weak at times, petty at others, and they often depend upon men for validation. Above all else, Abdou's writing is real and honest. Anything Boys Can Do stands far above your usual chick-lit -- it's an enjoyable, contemporary, and hip read ... but one which also makes you think. In that way, Anything Boys Can Do straddles the divide between chick-lit and serious literature.