Uneven writing but provocative stories with a clear, vital message.
The holiday season adds further strain to complex, tense relationships in this diverse collection of short stories.
In 14 stories, Edwards-Stout (Songs for the New Depression, 2011) assumes an impressive range of voices: ball-breaking business woman, grade schooler struggling with gender identity, mother-to-be and transgender father, uprooted domestic worker, and more. This willingness to step inside the minds of such disparate, often nonmainstream characters hints at Edwards-Stout’s confidence as a writer and his broad life experiences. While a book that shifts perspectives so frequently could become dizzying, Edwards-Stout tethers his characters to recurring themes of giving, holidays and acceptance. In “The Old Rugged Cross,” Cassandra follows her son, Reggie, from Alabama to California. He’s a fireman, a profession that killed his father, Cassandra’s husband. While Cassandra is content in Jackson, Ala., and in the honest work of a domestic, she misses her son and yields to his pleas to relocate: “He was all she had, aside from Jesus.” But when Reggie dies just before Christmas in the line of duty, Cassandra abandons Jesus and her old, weathered Bible: “[S]he banished it to a drawer, piling other books on top, as if to suffocate it.” Cassandra revels in being forsaken until she learns to accept her son’s choices, his dedication to service and her own source of passion. Acceptance—of oneself and of others—is Edwards-Stout’s resounding message. Elsewhere, in “The Cape,” a young man struggles to accept the death of many friends from AIDS; in “Hearts,” a high school girl learns to accept being Jewish; and in “Gifts Not Yet Given,” a mother finds a heartbreaking but tender way to accept giving her child up for adoption. Edwards-Stout’s stories are original and important, yet the delivery isn’t flawless. Awkward sentence structures throughout the book tend to stall reading and force characters to perform the impossible: “Running back out to the car, Paul hauled in his last items.” And in several stories, a change of heart comes too easily. For instance, during a single visit, a mother appears to abandon her lifelong bias against her child’s gender identity. Readers appreciate some resolution, but the kind of acceptance these characters seek is often too easily won here.
Uneven writing but provocative stories with a clear, vital message.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0983983736
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Circumspect Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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