Shut Up You're Pretty

Description

A high-wire collection of darkly humorous stories about a young woman floating in and out of her skin. A woman contemplates her Congolese traditions during a family wedding; a teenage girl looks for happiness inside a pack of cigarettes; a mother reconnects with her daughter through their shared interest in fish, and a young woman decides on shaving her head in the waiting room of an abortion clinic. These punchy, sharply observed stories blur the lines between longing and choosing, exploring the narrator's experience as an involuntary one. Tinged with pathos and humour, they interrogate the moments in which femininity, womanness, and identity are not only questioned but also imposed.

Tea Mutonji is a writer and poet. She has been awarded and published by The Scarborough Fair Magazine in fiction and nonfiction and by the Ontario Book Publishers Organization as a Scarborough Emerging Writer in the 2017 "What's Your Story?" contest. She is currently finishing her minor in Creative Writing. Shut Up You're Pretty is her first book.

Each story is a separate, richly-described glimpse into an aspect of the protagonist's life, and together they form a whole picture of a young woman who is struggling to understand herself and her world. --Book Riot The stories are vivid and unsettling in their detail ... Mutonji writes with grit and quick-witted humor. The ease with which these stories unfold is a facet of the author's craft: the prose holds its emotion in the same way the characters hold their pain. --Quill and Quire (STARRED REVIEW)