A poignant and intelligent set of tales that effectively thematizes the importance of place.
Snodgrass presents a collection of linked short stories that revolve around a failed steel town in Western Pennsylvania.
As the author observes in a prefatory note, the once-booming steel mills in the Keystone State began to go bust in the 1980s, and with that lost prosperity, an entire way of life vanished. Here, he offers elegiac tales set in his struggling fictional town of Furnass, outside Pittsburgh; one of them, “Coda,” is a short story, while the others, including the titular work, are novella-length. In the first, Her Father’s Daughter, Jennifer Sutcliff seems set on severing her ties with Furnass forever; she reorganizes the real estate company that her father, Dick, built and controversially sells the land upon which he built it to an industrial park—a move that her mother feels is a dismissal of her father’s legacy. Jennifer then sets her sights on Pamela DiCello, the woman for whom Dick left his wife, and discovers a legal way to divest her of the trust Dick established for her. However, Jennifer finds herself moved by Pamela’s account of her relationship with Dick as well as her attachment to the place in which she lives: “I left a luxurious all-expenses-paid town house and way of life in upscale Seneca to live in this narrow frame insul-brick-covered hundred-year-old house in a dying mill town….This was my parents’ house, Jennifer; after they both passed I had trouble thinking about it just sitting here on its lonesome.”
Snodgrass affectingly portrays an increasingly obsolete notion—an unbreakable attachment to one’s home—in a world of peripatetic cosmopolitanism. However, the stories aren’t simply set pieces meant to present a philosophical theory; the author provides a powerful defense of locality by training his attention on a particular locale and not an abstruse polemic. Herein lies the principal strength of Snodgrass’ collection, in that he presents a series of protagonists trying to flee their homes but who are drawn back by powerful, if mysterious, forces. For instance, in the book’s title story, Allison Lyle returns to Furnass from Washington, D.C., in order to settle her recently deceased father’s “haphazard estate.” She hires local Kevin McCallum to clean out a chaotic, overstuffed basement; he’s depicted as essentially the opposite of Allison, as someone who’s so attached to Furnass that he labors to preserve its disappearing past. Allison finally learns that she never really knew her father; he had a secret life, one that was admirably honorable. But instead of pride, this discovery fills her with a “tremendous feeling of loss, a feeling that she had missed something important in her life.” It’s a revelation that Snodgrass movingly relates, and it’s one that readers will find especially poignant, as Allison lives something of a secret life of her own. Overall, this assemblage of stories is one that’s as timely as it is thoughtful—a meditative counterweight to stories by authors preoccupied with wanderlust.
A poignant and intelligent set of tales that effectively thematizes the importance of place.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73659-946-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Calling Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: today
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