by Keith Lesmeister ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2017
A gritty, emotionally sensitive clutch of stories.
A debut story collection about hard-luck denizens of rural and exurban Iowa.
The heartland, as captured in Lesmeister’s debut, is a downcast place, replete with meth shacks, mortality, and regret. The narrator of “Burrowing Animals” is a recovering addict who’s desperate to prove he’s worthy of seeing his children again; in “Lie Here Next to Me,” a young woman tries to protect her dying mother from her grandmother’s interventions; in “A Real Future,” one of the few black residents of a rural county endures a series of headaches and humiliations from everyone from DMV workers to people judging his marriage to a white woman. Lesmeister’s vision of Iowa isn't exclusively somber, though. He can bring wit and lightness to these dirty-realist tales, as in “Today You’re Calling Me Lou,” in which the narrator ferries his foulmouthed, no-nonsense grandmother to a garage sale. (“She laughs and it sounds like motor oil gurgling around her lungs.”) He can also craft tender characterizations, as in “Between the Fireflies,” in which two fifth-graders are charged with shooting rabbits approaching a neighborhood garden, a task lightly in parallel to the girl’s father’s deployment in the Middle East. And like any good short story writer, he can deliver an eye-catching opening (“Elbow and I ducked out of our nephew’s birthday party and drove to Walmart to check on ammo prices”), though a broader canvas might improve some of these stories, which sometimes close on notes of pat ambiguity. But for a first-timer, Lesmeister has developed an admirably concise style and a knack for capturing people during difficult coming-of-age moments or dispiriting processes of decline. Like the amateur cowherds in the title story, they’re recognizing that life is often disorderly, with help hard to come by.
A gritty, emotionally sensitive clutch of stories.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944850-05-0
Page Count: 211
Publisher: MG Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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by Graham Swift ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 1996
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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