A strong year for the series.
For this year’s collection—short fiction’s version of the All-Star Team—editor Dark has reduced the number of stories from twenty to seventeen in order to include three lengthier pieces.
Refreshingly, each of the three longer stories departs from current fiction’s overly familiar “middle-class quotidian” terrain. Mary Swan’s “The Deep”—given First Prize by judges Mary Gordon, Michael Chabon, and Mona Simpson—takes place during WWI and centers on a pair of peculiarly co-dependent female twins who go overseas as civilian volunteers. In Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” a nervous British surveyor traverses the Himalayas of the 1860s, while George Saunders’s brilliant “Pastoralia” (printed, fortunately, from the full text in Saunders’s book of the same name, and not from The New Yorker’s truncated version) is about a hapless fellow playing a caveman in a “historical” theme park. The judges give Second Prize to Dan Chaon’s “Big Me,” an extraordinary piece about a boy in Nebraska who becomes convinced that a stranger on his block is his future self. Meanwhile, ever-reliable Alice Munro takes both Third Prize, with “Floating Bridge,” and a Special Award for Continuing Achievement. This award was last given in 1986, to Joyce Carol Oates, who also appears in this year’s collection, her 29th O. Henry selection. There are a few weird recurrences—in two separate stories, people come across children’s hands—and, as usual, a preoccupation with illness and violence. The inclusion of historical fiction—as well as wonderfully strange fare like Pinckney Benedict’s “Zog-19: A Scientific Romance,” about an alien made of iron and sentient gases who takes over the life and loves of a Seneca Valley farmer—keeps the volume various and interesting, despite a small handful of desultory pieces. Taking this year’s magazine award is The New Yorker, which published five of the seventeen stories.
A strong year for the series.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49878-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.
Piper Manning is determined to sell her family’s property so she can leave her hometown behind, but when her siblings come back with life-changing secrets and her sexy neighbor begins to feel like “The One,” she might have to redo her to-do list.
As children, Piper and her younger siblings, Gavin and Winnie, were sent to live with their grandparents in Wildstone, California, from the Congo after one of Gavin’s friends was killed. Their parents were supposed to meet them later but never made it. Piper wound up being more of a parent than her grandparents, though: “In the end, Piper had done all the raising. It’d taken forever, but now, finally, her brother and sister were off living their own lives.” Piper, the queen of the bullet journal, plans to fix up the family’s lakeside property her grandparents left the three siblings when they died. Selling it will enable her to study to be a physician’s assistant as she’s always wanted. However, just as the goal seems in sight, Gavin and Winnie come home, ostensibly for Piper’s 30th birthday, and then never leave. Turns out, Piper’s brother and sister have recently managed to get into a couple buckets of trouble, and they need some time to reevaluate their options. They aren’t willing to share their problems with Piper, though they’ve been completely open with each other. And Winnie, who’s pregnant, has been very open with Piper’s neighbor Emmitt Reid and his visiting son, Camden, since the baby’s father is Cam’s younger brother, Rowan, who died a few months earlier in a car accident. Everyone has issues to navigate, made more complicated by Gavin and Winnie’s swearing Cam to secrecy just as he and Piper try—and fail—to ignore their attraction to each other. Shalvis keeps the physical and emotional tension high, though the siblings’ refusal to share with Piper becomes tedious and starts to feel childish.
Shalvis’ latest retains her spark and sizzle.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296139-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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