Review and Blog Tour: How You Leave Texas

 HOW YOU LEAVE TEXAS

By: Alana Cash 

BLURB:  

How You Leave Texas is a volume of three short stories and a novella about four young women who leave Midland, Austin, Fort Worth and Mayville, Texas for New York, California, Jakarta, and in one instance, jail.  They seek escape from boredom and sorrow and find it.  The stories are hilarious, tragic, revelatory.

Here is an excerpt from the novella Frying Your Burger:

I picked up the phone and called Mehta.

When he answered I asked, “Do you want to meet me somewhere and hang out for a while?”

“I can’t. I’m in the middle of tinting the hair under my arms.”

“What color?”

“Red.”

“Mehta, I’m in a quandary.”

“Go on.”

“That guy Zach called and we’ve got a date to meet at his house on Saturday night.”

“Did he mention anything about electric appliances or a collie suit?”

“No.”

“A live studio audience.”

“No.”

“Acrobatics?  Bondage?  A trained flea circus?”

“No.

“I can understand your quandary. I wouldn’t want to go either.”

“It’s not going I’m worried about. It’s leaving.”

“Just don’t leave anything behind,” he said. “Hold on a minute, the timer just went off.”

He put the phone down and I heard water running in the background. Mehta rinsing his armpits. Then there was silence as he viewed his underarm handiwork in the mirror.

“Now where were we,” he said when he picked up the phone again.

“How does it look?”

“Cheerful. Now, about the date.”

“I’m not sure I’ll have a good time.”

“My, what a poor attitude. If you don’t have a good time, steal something.”

“What?”

“Take a little souvenir. An ashtray, a towel, a Ming vase.”

“Anything you particularly want for your apartment?”

“Let me think. I’d like something crystal. You can never have enough crystal.”

“You don’t have any crystal.”

“See what I mean.”

My Review:

How You Leave Texas was really unique. Despite having read the blurb, I wasn't really prepared for the four separate stories. serves me right for skimming! Lol. But I'm definitely glad that I gave the book a chance. It tells the stories about how four girls, or I guess women really, leave their respective parts of Texas for the big city...or jail. All of it was fun, funny, and a great read. You know, it was really easy to relate. We've all had our moments of change, of doubt. When we are heading off to college, taking a new job, moving...all of these are huge life changing events and it made it really easy to understand what the characters were going through.  I really felt involved in the story and really dedicated to the characters. If there was one flaw it was that I wished I could have spent more time with each of them. Though the endings of the stories were a bit vague for my tastes (Im a firm believer in the HEA!) you could still enjoy yourself. The stories leave you guessing and asking for more...and I guess that's another great way to go about writing. A solid read. One I would definitely recommend!

Meet the Author!

Alana Cash is an adventurer.  She’s trekked alone through war-torn Serbia and has slept in a KGB interrogation room in Prague.  She’s been to a gypsy fair in rural England, a bullfight in Laredo, and parasailing in Acapulco.  She’s been inside the New York Stock Exchange and eaten in J. Pierpont Morgan’s home dining room.  She's gone on a ride-along in a New York City patrol car and kissed a man inside the Norman Bates Psycho house at Universal Studios.  She’s been a lifeguard, legal secretary, accountant, writer, teacher, filmmaker and artist.
 Her experiences are inspiration for her work as an acclaimed writer and filmmaker. 

• She was one of 60 US teachers profiled on the PBS series, "A Writer's Exchange," for her talent as a teacher at the University of Texas Informal Classes  - many of her students published and won writing awards

• Her feature film, "Tom's Wife," based on her novel of the same name, won awards all over the world

• Her documentary "Anna Freud: Under Analysis," part of documentary trilogy on women in science, was translated into German for broadcast in Austria, Germany & Switzerland.