Summary Of Red Lights Like Laughter By Amanda Davis

In my life, the books I have read fit into two distinct categories: fiction and nonfiction. However, this marking period, I read Circling the Drain by Amanda Davis, which is a member of a book category that was foreign to me, short stories. In her stories, Davis includes women that are faced with various emotional predicaments, such as loss and love, but face the problems in different situations. A few of these problems are caused by the desire to love a man that has a negative impact upon their lives. Davis has an amazing ability to control different stories by making them unrealistic and interesting to draw the reader to a different world where they can witness strange events occurring, and imagine a “terrible laugh” that causes a movie theater

The stories usually follow young women that are trying to cope with different types of losses, some recent while others occurred long before. In most of the stories, the women address their problems in an attempt to rid themselves of the predicaments they are facing, which was sometimes caused by an influential male character. So, even though the women can make bad choices because of the people they choose to surround themselves with, they can still succeed after they have rid themselves of the bad influences. In “Red Lights Like Laughter” Davis creates a story about a couple living in a run down room, with a female protagonist that is upset “The Fire”. The women has conflicting emotions for her boyfriend as a result of “The Fire” and Davis shows how she feels by contrasting the blizzard outside with the hotel room that she shared with her boyfriend where “All she could do was gulp and gasp: the heat of the small room overwhelming.”(9). The protagonist also felt “ more stuck than she ever had before.”(9). Davis creates a situation in which her character is describing her slow change in feelings for her companion without directly stating her feelings. Instead she is showing her feelings by repeatedly saying that she needed air, and could not breathe until she was outside away from partner ‘tripping as though on new legs.”(17). Davis’ ability to show the characters emotions instead of

While circling the drain is about a young woman that abandons "the flat Midwestern landscape of her life."(74) only to get her heartbroken by the man she followed to New York. “The Visit addresses the struggles of families that have a relative with Alzheimer's. In the book, Davis successfully experiments with the supernatural, as shown at the end of “Circling the Drain” when the woman sees an angel that turns into her ex-lover. Davis also creates relatable situations, such as in “The Visit” when the grandfather had Alzheimer’s, which adds interest to the book because the stories surround the idea of young women losing various things, but Davis manages to create a series of unrelated, interesting stories that I liked very much. She has a unique way of controlling the characters emotions so that the audience can easily relate to the characters. The audience is also interactive with the book because Davis’ writing style makes the reader want the women to succeed even though some of them seem very weak, the audience wants them to overcome their terrible partners. The readers want to see the women succeed, and Davis understands her audience because the women do overcome their obstacles in some of the stories. While others have to face the consequences for their action. The balance of happy endings and sad ending in Circling the Drain is what makes the entertaining because the ending is not