In Jablonski's debut, the title only tells half the story, half of any story in the book. Yes, conjoined twins, exploding tummy tucks, transvestites, exhibitionists, severed monkey hands are not the norm; however, much of the angst, self-consciousness and terror are human commonalities. Jablonski asks a series of what if questions, in the way that all good fiction must: what if the conjoined Hyatt sisters walked into your hair salon? What if your father dies, and you are a masochist, where will your grieving takes its outlet? What if a nice old man asks to take your infant brother for a walk? What if you find a severed monkey hand? What separates these stories is often the complication of the body with all its often virulent juices and desires.

Most of the stories are well-wrought, carefully playing out the answers to questions on cheating husbands, dying fathers, self-absorbed mothers, but some of the stories stumble under the weight of the oddities, dwelling too long on the bizarre or disgusting. The result seems to be exactly what Jablonski seemed most interested in avoiding-the characters become broken bodies rather than characters living with broken bodies. Still, most of the story telling is evocative. Jablonski linked the first three stories to an unhappy family of mothers and daughters who can barely tolerate or attend to each other. In the second section's six stories, new characters populate the dreary, surreal landscape of the book-a grieving orderly, a girl trapped in a monstrous body, formerly conjoined twins.

Jablonski is at her best voicing children. In "One of Us," she writes, "We have separate beds, but sometimes we sleep in one bed, stomach to stomach, the way we were born." Immediately setting the scene and the circumstances, Jablonski deftly continues and the facts of the brothers' bodies and physical separation merely reinforce the connection and disconnection between the brothers, Hussein and Hassan. In "The Good Life," she narrates through a young girl, Valerie, who offers readers her matter-of-fact impressions of a father slowly dying of kidney failure, a mother overwhelmed and an infant brother who goes missing. Occasionally funny, often moving, Jablonski writes, "Just to get from the bedroom to the bathroom, Valerie's father needs to use a cane, and soon he will need two, two four pronged canes. And then he will crawl. Her father gets to use the bathroom first-he's sickest, and he is the father after all." As in so many of the stories, the backdrop for the body's betrayal is the family home.

The author resists sentimentality and the effect is all the more powerful for her restraint. Jablonski adeptly sets scenes ("Inside it smells like scrambled eggs and peach, fake peach"), sketches characters ("...the hairless rings around Andy's areolas, hairless and gummed with linty pills of adhesive from tape Andy uses sometimes, like he's done since he was twelve, to flatten the girlish puffiness of his nipples."), and pushes those characters into action that seem inevitable, however unexpected.

Read this book because it will surprise you, or because you want an excuse to go out and rent Freakshow and Bound for Life, because somewhere along the way, you have always wondered what it might be like to inhabit someone else's swollen or disfigured skin, because you knew as well as anybody else that looks do matter and they effect the way people live and love. Thankfully, Jablonski acknowledges that, and then allows the reader into lives not often seen.