An elegant, eco-minded collection of tales set in a Montana valley.
A debut novel in stories follows the rise of a Western town through the men and women who build it.
In a remote Montana valley, a community takes shape beneath a snowy crag called Crazy Mountain. A real estate agent seizes an opportunity to buy a massive ranch on the cheap, but flipping it turns out to be a bigger challenge than he bargained for. A wealthy couple from Los Angeles, still mourning the murder of their son, eventually buy the property, but their desire for uninterrupted nature is ruined by the trespasses of their “yokel” neighbors. A divorced man from Missouri uses his last bit of money to start a trailer park, but when he breaks ground on a convenience store to serve his residents, he’s unhappy to find what seems to be an Indigenous burial site. An older woman waits for her husband to die on their remote, snowed-in ranch, knowing she will have to dispose of the body on her own: “It took two weeks for Frank to finish dying.…After he took his last breath and there was nothing left but the body, she undressed him and wrapped him in a cotton sheet, trying not to focus on the miles of empty space surrounding her now that Frank was gone.” Across 15 stories that span from 1970 to 2015, Atchison relates the history of the valley as it develops from a lonesome ranch into a wildfire-threatened exurb. The author’s observant eye for nature makes her an especially adept chronicler of its decline: “Juniper tapped her brakes…when she saw the massive Aspen Springs Subdivision cluttering the sagebrush foothills where the elk used to graze in the bunchgrass all winter long. The hillsides had been taken over by cheatgrass and knapweed and the mountain slopes were stained with the rusty-brown hue of beetle-killed trees.” Each tale takes on a new character’s perspective, leaving the valley itself to serve as the book’s true protagonist. The result is a story collection with a novelistic sweep, capturing what is lost and what is gained in the development of the mountainous West.
An elegant, eco-minded collection of tales set in a Montana valley.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9854317-1-1
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Sowilo Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.
Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South.
It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of compassion hidden beneath his self-protective exterior. Like pretty much everyone else in Lee County, Virginia, hollowed out economically by the coal and tobacco industries, he sees himself as someone with no prospects and little worth. One of Kingsolver’s major themes, hit a little too insistently, is the contempt felt by participants in the modern capitalist economy for those rooted in older ways of life. More nuanced and emotionally engaging is Demon’s fierce attachment to his home ground, a place where he is known and supported, tested to the breaking point as the opiate epidemic engulfs it. Kingsolver’s ferocious indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, angrily stated by a local girl who has become a nurse, is in the best Dickensian tradition, and Demon gives a harrowing account of his descent into addiction with his beloved Dori (as naïve as Dickens’ Dora in her own screwed-up way). Does knowledge offer a way out of this sinkhole? A committed teacher tries to enlighten Demon’s seventh grade class about how the resource-rich countryside was pillaged and abandoned, but Kingsolver doesn’t air-brush his students’ dismissal of this history or the prejudice encountered by this African American outsider and his White wife. She is an art teacher who guides Demon toward self-expression, just as his friend Tommy provokes his dawning understanding of how their world has been shaped by outside forces and what he might be able to do about it.
An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-325-1922
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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