IN THE VALLEY

A brace of strong stories, and the novella's a fine, suspenseful contribution to the thriving genre of Appalachian mayhem.

Rash's latest is a collection of 10 stories anchored by a novella featuring the ruthless Serena Pemberton of his best-known novel, Serena (2008), as she returns to the U.S. and resumes her reign of terror. Though Serena has received the lion's share of attention, the short story has always been Rash's best genre. Several pieces collected here—mostly set in western North Carolina from the Civil War to the present—center on revenge that wants to see itself as righteous. Rash is expert at revealing the sword of vengeance's double edge—how honed it is, how it cuts whomever wields it. In the excellent "Flight," for example, Stacy, a wounded, justice-minded young park ranger, determines that she'll have the better of a local who keeps tauntingly poaching trout. Another standout is "The Belt," about an octogenarian Civil War veteran and his talisman, the lucky brass buckle that saved him in battle. His family has struggled mightily—that buckle's luck has never seemed transferable—but old Jubal hopes the luck might extend, in one last moment of crisis, to his namesake grandson, a toddler. Perhaps best of all is "L'homme Blessé," about a recently widowed art teacher summoned to a deep-country cabin where an old man, psychologically wrecked after World War II, lived out his days sheltered by his own art—a near-perfect re-creation of the drawings inside a French cave the shattered soldier had visited. But the title novella makes for the centerpiece. Unrepentant lumber queen Serena has returned home, where she needs to accomplish the impossible: clear-cut a last mountaintop forest in just days. To do so—with the help of her conscienceless enforcer, Galloway, and his terrifying, spooky mother—she must bribe, cajole, intimidate, murder, perhaps even bend the rules of time, but there's little Serena can't do. Sure, now and again Rash tries to channel Cormac McCarthy and fails; a couple stories seem slight; and so on. But those are quibbles, not disfiguring flaws. A brace of strong stories, and the novella's a fine, suspenseful contribution to the thriving genre of Appalachian mayhem.

Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-385-54429-0

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 18


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2022


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

DEMON COPPERHEAD

An angry, powerful book seething with love and outrage for a community too often stereotyped or ignored.

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 18


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2022


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Winner

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

WELLNESS

A warmhearted satire that chronicles our “perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant” accommodations to life.

A bittersweet novel of love gained, lost, and regained over the course of decades.

“They stare across the alley, into dark apartments, and they don’t know it, but they’re staring at each other.” It’s not an outtake from Hitchcock’s Rear Window but instead the wistful longings of two lonely people. Jack Baker, newly arrived in Chicago from Kansas in the 1990s, is a talented photographer who bristles when practical-minded people ask him what his work is about—to say nothing of why he works with Polaroids, which, a hipster friend reminds him, “are mass-produced, instant, cheap, impermanent.” Yes, and that’s the point, for though Jack comes from the windblown prairie, he’s pretty avant-garde. Elizabeth Augustine is a quadruple major at DePaul, “five majors if you count theater, which I have no talent for but enjoy nonetheless,” and exactly the woman Jack hoped he would meet. Life proceeds: That arty hipster becomes a real estate mogul who plants them in a development very much outside their price range until Elizabeth pulls down the big bucks from the psychological research firm that gives Hill’s latest its simple title. “Basically they were a watchdog group, a subcontractor for the FDA and FTC, sniffing out bullshit,” Hill writes, but Elizabeth, scraping by while Jack pulls down pennies as an adjunct professor, discovers that there’s hay to be made creating bullshit rather than exposing it—making airplane seats narrower, for instance, and then selling once normal-sized seats at a premium. Hill romps through our soufflélike culture with a nice sendup of academic literature and broad jabs at memes ranging from organic food (“one-hundred-percent bioavailable”) to progressive parenting, open marriage, and cult behavior (“Elizabeth knew...that the thing that most effectively strengthened and deepened delusions was being surrounded by people who shared the same delusions”) while delivering a story that suggests that while love may not conquer all, it makes a good start.

A warmhearted satire that chronicles our “perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant” accommodations to life.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023

ISBN: 9780593536117

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023

Close Quickview