A friend of mine once wrote a story about two kid siblings who volley cruel jokes against each other (this friend does not happen to be Mary Otis, but I promise to mention her and her story collection before starting a new paragraph). My friend’s story takes a dark turn when one of the siblings manages to trap the other in a small, confined space and walks away. The protagonist intends to let the sister kick and scream for a while and then release her, but the longer he waits (was it a he? Did the author specify gender? The specifics elude me), the more he fears her retaliation, so he puts it off. Such have I procrastinated on writing this review. Over the past few months, a paperback bearing the title Yes, Yes, Cherries has been interred in the bowels of my sweaty-ass backpack, kicking and screaming to see daylight, stuffed between my gym shorts and a hardcover book of trashy horror stories I picked up at a yard sale off Hawthorne. Now, with shaking hands, I withdraw the brainchild of Mary Otis from its prison (and I meant “sweat-ass” literally; that backpack has seen many a hot summer day from behind a bicycle chugging up Mt. Tabor, which is where I practice my nun-chuck skills), and with a stomach that thinks it’s riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the county fair, I open it.

“Janie is in sales, real sales, important sales that include clients, accounts, quotas, and jumping on planes…” Before reading Pilgrim Girl, I never knew I could be placed so effortlessly in the mind of a young adolescent girl with a crush on her neighbor’s husband. The short, choppy prose forces me to process Allison’s environment exactly as she does, sizing people up by frantically stringing together observations, and always with a fascination for adult careers and adults in general. There is a lot going on in Allison’s world and she doesn’t know what it all means. I could jump out of her skin and into a literature discussion group to explore the motifs and how they operate in a sublimation-of-childhood context, but I can’t really, because right now I’m a confused adolescent girl standing on the sidewalk holding a [BLEEP BLEEP (I’d be giving away too much if I said what I was about to say)], still longing for my neighbor’s husband.

The other story that really stands out in this collection is Unstruck, which again captures the voice of a young child, and does so with an ease and sensitivity that’s rare in fiction. Now I’m starting to sound like an advertisement blurb that should be on the back cover…what else can I say? Just read it. “Pritchard’s hair smelled of dirt, chicken, grease, and wind. His eyes were a strange flat green like the back of a leaf.” No, stop tricking me into reading it aloud to you, read it yourself.

My summarizing comment would be that Mary Otis is most in her groove when writing from the viewpoint of youths. The stories centering around adult characters were engaging too — I especially enjoyed Welcome To Yosemite, which is about a teacher (also named Allison) who loses her job (savor this prose: “His fingertips press the ridge, and his touch seems to directly connect to her teeth, which throb, the pain in her mouth oddly galvanizing into hard desire and want”) — but Mary Otis has a remarkable gift for writing very adult stories about — and told by — children.

Why would one be intimidated by the task of reviewing a book? What can I say about a story you haven’t read? Am I trying to sell it to you? Or am I just telling you what to expect, assuming you’ve already decided to read this book? What will this paperback do to me when I let it out of my backpack? Levitate, flap around and beat me senseless? Right now it’s lying calmly on the bed, and Lorrie Moore is telling me that this book is “Funny, Brave and Amazing” and I suppose I don’t disagree with her.

Douglas Dean, the patron saint of the Portland Fiction Bad-Ass-Motherfuckers- I mean, Project, in the course of his gentle proddings to get mobilized on this book review, has suggested that I create my own rating system and evaluate the contents of Yes, Yes, Cherries accordingly. A professor once told a room full of story-ists (is that a word? Or is it fictionalists? No, that one’s giving me the ol’ red squiggly line too, which makes me feel like Microsoft Word is my girlfriend and I’m in the doghouse for something I said but am too dense to realize why it offended her) that for a story to be a truly great story, there is one mandatory requirement that is indispensable to its immortalization, and that is…a “great” story has to mention pizza at least once. Snacking on pizza is the criterion for a great day, and a great story is much like a great day, right? So my rating scale will be a pizza scale, ranging from a no-cheese pizza to a Deep Dish Super Supreme. As an example for you to calibrate an average in my literary tastes, I would say that Edgar Allen Poe’s Ligeia is a pan pizza with a gourmet three-cheese blend over a cilantro-garlic alfredo sauce, topped with artichokes, black olives, chicken strips and caramelized onions. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is a breakfast calzone stuffed with sausage, peppers, mushrooms, fried potatoes and overflowing with mozzarella, and towards the end you bite into something caustic and fermented but you’re not sure what it is, and you feel a little bit queasy later. The crust represents stability of plot, the cheese signifies that my emotions were engaged, the sauce is for intellectual ideas, and the toppings represent all the elements of fiction that can’t be predicted or prescribed in a formula — the magic.

Pilgrim Girl is baked in a brick oven, and is topped with calamari and an exquisite blend of cheeses — I think I taste some gouda in the mix. Pretty basic tomato sauce, and a crust you can hold onto; you won’t be pulling out a knife and fork to eat this slice, even though at first glance it appears deceptively like you’ll need a spoon to eat it. (and by the way, “gouda” means I did weep).