Whimsy: A Novella
(By Shannon McLeod)
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| Author | Shannon McLeod |
Whimsy is a 7th grade teacher in Metro Detroit; her insecurities are compounded by her students, who never pass up a chance to humiliate her. However, when Whimsy meets Rikesh, a journalist who writes a human interest piece about her crash, she finally feels happiness is possible. Though he is emotionally unavailable, Whimsy is stuck on pursuing Rikesh, and they use one another to project what they lack. As she struggles with self-doubt in their courtship, at work, and in her friendships, she considers the ways her own perceptions of her physical appearance have shaped her reality.
Winner of the Wild Onion Novella Contest
"Whimsy is lonesome and poignant, and even a bit funny, too. Shannon McLeod has written a moving, authentic portrait of a young woman at the start of her adult life, wrestling with its unfairness and unease. McLeod's heroine longs to be seen fully, and with compassion, but can't yet see herself that way, and it's compelling to watch her move through the world.”
— Edan Lepucki, New York Times Bestselling Author of California
“Shannon McLeod’s writing is funny, raw, and ultimately intimate and tender.”
— Bryan Hurt, author of Everyone Wants to Be Ambassador to France
“In her tough and surprising debut novella, Shannon McLeod makes her nuanced observations feel inevitable. With steady restraint and immaculate pacing, rendered in only the simplest of strokes, it builds and builds to finally rupture so much greater than the sum of its parts.”
— Tim Kinsella, author of Sunshine on an Open Tomb
“The women in Shannon McLeod’s debut story collection, Whimsy, are reminiscent of the women in Mary Miller’s Big World and Roxane Gay’s Difficult Women; young American women navigating a new world of female aloneness and autonomy, an aloneness in turns empowering and dizzying, battling society and men and themselves for feelings of self-worth and deservedness, battling the stillness of autonomy.”
— Elizabeth Ellen, author of Person/a: a novel”
