COYOTE GIRL

Compelling stories explore hard lives and hope in a landscape as dangerous as it is enchanting.

Most of the pieces in Hicks’ debut collection are told from the points of view of girls or young women; all share a Southwestern setting and convey the authenticity of felt experience. Grief and loss are recurring themes (“Carriage” details the loss of a pregnancy); transformation is another (in “Rock Collection,” tokens of memory become a protective fortress). A few stories hint at the supernatural (the imagined wolf in “If Only I Could Tell You”), while others, like “My Drugstore Queen” and “Farrago,” highlight fleeting moments of daily life. “Drill,” which is about a school lockdown, and “Extraterrestre,” in which a young girl secretly aids a fugitive immigrant, address up-to-the-minute social issues, and women stand up to violent men in “Cowboy Titanium,” “Little Lady,” and “Pick-Me-Girl.” Flash fiction pieces less than two pages long pack a powerful emotional punch and make up more than half of the collection. Hicks’ writing is as spare and stripped to the essentials as the desert her stories inhabit. One brief piece, “There Is No Advice I’d Give My 16-Year-Old Self,” is almost a prose poem. In the title entry, a mother tells her daughter, “We should howl and get lost and find ourselves again and again.” Despite their brevity, the stories are packed with biting social commentary (in one of the longer stories, rivalry between a pair of fake cowboys in a “Wild West” theme park leads to tragedy), distinctive characters (tough-talking Clementine and sweet Dally take a Thelma and Louise–style joyride to the Grand Canyon in “Rattlesnakes”), and vivid imagery: In “Blink,” a school bus driver “would pick us up and drop us off like he was in the sanitation business”; a girl engaged in a staring contest sees “the pasture, the cows, the rolling hills beyond, and all the blue above” reflected in her opponent’s dark eyes.

A stunning collection of short fiction set in the American Southwest.