Bookwormers

By Aimee Bender

In every story we are looking for a connection; whether it be with the surroundings or the characters or even what those characters are living through. Yet walking through Aimee Bender’s, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, one may find that they are losing themselves rather quickly. I wanted to explore this story because when I first read it, something about the craziness and directional-less-ness of it all fascinated me. It took me several times to figure out what was going on, but once I found some sort of a connection between life events and what was going on throughout the story, it made it so much more enjoyable to read.

I have always been a fan of the fantastical stories – one’s in which don’t make much sense unless you pull them apart and work with them with your mind, body and hands. I feel that to be a successful writer, you must first be a successful reader, and I believe that by molding stories on your own accord allows you to merge in the original authors mind and get a sense as to what they tried to convey on paper. Aimee Bender’s story definitely allows for molding and play.

If you’re looking for a conventional story, this is not the one for you. However, if you’re willing to put aside the well-known aspects that makes a  story and are willing to dive into the unknown and the fantastical, then I suggest picking this up and giving it a go.

Aimee plays a lot with themes in her stories – though instead of finding a cliché way to express isolation, burdens and sexuality, she explores the realms of fantasy and darkness. In The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, she focuses on themes of desire, isolation, burdens, loss, suppressions, passion, sexual desires and deformity of the human essence. Aimee ventures down a broken road of lust and frenzy to express how emotions in the human thrive and tick. Essentially, it is that humans, male or female, express their frustration with rage, loss, connection and freedom through means of isolation or longing to connect. The inner self is truly dying to escape into a world where outer images matter most and Aimee Bender writes to express what our inner selves struggle to inform.