red panda redux

I've said how wonderful Andrea Seigel's acid, funny, heartbreaking first novel Like the Red Panda is here before. Sean Carman says it better at Maud's:

Panda works the opposite magic. You’ll conclude the novel feeling you got to know a young woman who wanted to kill herself, and you’ll understand her decision, and lament it, in other words the full tragedy of her life will come home to you, and hard. Think about how few novels achieve this, how few even honestly attempt it, and you’ll realize that Seigel has done a rare and wonderful thing. Any book that can open up the experience of a young woman like Stella Parish to someone like me (40, blind to his own despair, from the rural, desolate state of Wyoming, did I mention I attended my home state’s egalitarian university?) deserves the widest possible audience.

Read what he has to say, then read the book.