Moody and bittersweet: Save it for a literal rainy day and read in one sitting.
A slender collection of 16 interconnected stories set in and around a rain-soaked mountain town in Tennessee.
In this tender and pensive debut, the legends of sylvan, hard-luck (and fictional) Cleecey's Ferry connect its residents across time, age, and station of life: a girl who roamed the woods, blinded by eyelashes so long they hung in waist-length braids; a doomed circus elephant that still haunts the collective memory more than a century later; a drowned town hastily abandoned that sleeps under the waters of the reservoir lake; and the Rainpainter's colored sheets that hang between trees in the frequent downpours. In "Whittled Bone," a father collects curios to re-create scenes from his runaway daughter's dream journal. In "Satellites," a son gathers prescriptions using an invented back injury so he and his sister can assist their terminally ill father with his suicide on the night a satellite will fall back to Earth. After the death of his young son, the father in "Heirloom" flees in secret to a lonesome cabin, where he befriends the local crows and builds a mysterious box based on plans outlined on a series of left-behind postcards he finds in a drawer. In "Elephants," two boys visit the grave of Mary the Elephant, who was executed when a long-ago circus came to town, with Mary's demise then portrayed in minute detail in "How To Hang a Circus Elephant." (A warning to the curious that, yes, Mary's tale is based on true events.) Transformative loss and fragile hope permeate these stories, which are filled with gentle, stoic, and fractured masculinities, eroding memories, dead-enders and last-chancers, widowed fathers, lost children, and dead, dying, and otherwise departed mothers. Though all proceed at a fairly homogenous drift-down-the-river pace and are suffused with an alluring but rarely variable eccentric Appalachian melancholy, author Siegrist's atmospheric, fluid, and merciful prose proves irresistible.
Moody and bittersweet: Save it for a literal rainy day and read in one sitting.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-938235-88-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Hub City Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.
The making of a woman scientist over four decades of change in the middle of the 20th century.
“So what do you actually do?” Dr. Lottie Kristin Hart Levinson—aka Dr. Rat Westheimer—is asked at a cocktail party in 1984. “This may sound odd to you,” she replies, “but I study rat salivary glands. They’re more important than people think.” Her subsequent explanation details the role of cunnilingus in rat sex. Neither Lottie nor her creator is squeamish in any way—not about rat sex, or rat dissection, or human sex, all described with brio in these pages. As Lottie tells her football-star high school boyfriend, who becomes her first husband, “I want to know everything about my body, about your body, I want to try everything there is in the world, I want to try it all with you.” Actually, she saves some for her intrepid second husband 30-odd years later; there hasn’t been a menstruation sex scene like this since Scott Spencer’s Endless Love. Heyman’s debut novel after a successful story collection, Scary Old Sex (2016), also brings to mind Marge Piercy’s domestic dramas of the 1980s, which told the stories of women whose consciousness and lives were changed by the feminist movement and the new options it created in American life. From Lottie’s childhood in Michigan in the early 1940s through her struggles in the Vietnam War era to her maturity as a scientist, mother, and stepmother in the mid-1980s, her curiosity and intellect drive her as strongly as her hormones. It takes decades to tunnel her way through the walls sexism builds around her potential and find her way to the career in science she was made for. Caring as much about her work as she does about domestic life is a constant issue in Lottie’s adulthood; tragic consequences threaten and are not always averted.
Like its heroine, intelligent and lusty; full of real joys and sorrows.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-471-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A quiet and poignant debut from a writer to watch.
An Indigenous family is forever changed after one of their own goes missing.
Peters’ debut novel explores the lives of a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia as they grapple with their decades-old trauma. In 1962, Ruthie, the family’s youngest daughter, goes missing from the berry farm in Maine where they work every summer. Told from alternating perspectives, the novel follows Joe, Ruthie’s older brother and the last person to see her before she went missing, and Norma, a young girl living in Maine with an aloof father and overbearing mother. Lying on his deathbed, Joe thinks back on his life, which has been filled with grief, rage, and all-consuming guilt: “People have given me their time, their love, their bodies, their secrets. And I’ve given so little.” After a brutal act of violence, Joe spent the next few decades running from himself and his sins, so as not to inflict more harm onto the ones he loves the most. Meanwhile, Norma recounts her life, which was plagued by a different kind of guilt, one that caused her to always be the dutiful daughter—the daughter who didn’t ask too many questions, ignored the lack of baby pictures, and chose to forget the vivid and painful dreams that plagued her childhood (“Each time I woke, I grieved for the woman cloaked in darkness and I tried to call out to her”). Eventually, Norma goes to college, becomes a teacher, and falls in love—and she spends the next few decades finding a way to live with the unsettling feeling that something isn’t quite right with her life. As Norma’s true identity is barely concealed, the novel is less concerned with maintaining a mystery than with exploring how brutality ripples out, touching everything and everyone in its wake. Peters beautifully explores loss, grief, hope, and the invisible tether that keeps families intact even when they are ripped apart.
A quiet and poignant debut from a writer to watch.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2023
ISBN: 9781646221950
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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