A humorous, charming collection of tales set in a Midwestern town.
A volume of short stories probes the foibles and fascinations of the residents of a small Indiana town.
What goes for excitement in Sedalia may be different than in other places, but its residents are ready to swarm at the first hint of it. The nosy breakfasters at the local cafe speculate about an unknown car with New York plates that spent the night in a neighbor’s driveway. The idlers at the gas station are curious about how the local undertaker’s behavior has changed since the death of his wife. The sheriff has been getting reports of people buying night-vision goggles at the gun store, and the town doctor may be getting audited by the IRS. Nothing in Sedalia is too small to escape notice. “I mean, naked trucker, running along the bottom of the embankment below the northbound lane,” reports a state police officer at the beginning of one tale. “Nothing but shoes. Obviously trying to avoid being seen. Which is obviously impossible. We get eleven different calls.” Gossip is the fuel of the local discourse, though sometimes the really interesting things are the ones that don’t get said. People who spot bears, for example, can’t tell anyone about them given that the Department of Natural Resources’ official line is that there are no bears in Indiana. Most people born in the town stay in the town. Sedalians tend not to fare as well when they try to make it in the wider world, as with Wanda Sue Blankenship. Wanda moves to New York to be a lawyer and tries to hide her Southern Indiana accent—unsuccessfully. In these 19 stories, the residents of Sedalia are held up for readers’ appraisals, though they can never be judged as thoroughly by an outsider as they are by one another.
Johnson’s prose is easy and wry, perfectly calibrated to the speed of life in his fictional, eponymous municipality. “The skinny young man lay asleep in a filthy sleeping bag just a foot from the edge of the bridge abutment,” begins one tale about an anti-capitalist hitchhiker who has a short but memorable stay in town. “The drop to the dry stone river bed was fifteen feet. His head lay on folded pants, his long brass-colored hair hopelessly tangled. The snore suggested nasal occlusion.” The author has a knack for pinpointing not only the way characters look to the people around them, but also how they appear to themselves. Sedalia’s slight inferiority complex regarding the rest of America—and its snooty neighbor, Elmira, Indiana—is a recurring theme. “Dysfunction in the Mole Challenge Group” is a particular standout, but the strength of these stories is the way that characters weave in and out of them, offering a larger view of the dynamics of the town. Neighbors who appear in one piece are often explored at length in another. As in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and subsequent works of locality-based fiction, Johnson’s book manages to simultaneously poke fun and celebrate small-town American life.
A humorous, charming collection of tales set in a Midwestern town.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 257
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.
A British widow travels to Ibiza and learns that it’s never too late to have a happy life.
In a world that seems to be getting more unstable by the moment, Haig’s novels are a steady ship in rough seas, offering a much-needed positive message. In works like the bestselling The Midnight Library (2020), he reminds us that finding out what you truly love and where you belong in the universe are the foundations of building a better existence. His latest book continues this upbeat messaging, albeit in a somewhat repetitive and facile way. Retired British schoolteacher Grace Winters discovers that an old acquaintance has died and left her a ramshackle home in Ibiza. A widow who lost her only child years earlier, Grace is at first reluctant to visit the house, because, at 72, she more or less believes her chance for happiness is over—but when she rouses herself to travel to the island, she discovers the opposite is true. A mystery surrounds her friend’s death involving a roguish islander, his activist daughter, an internationally famous DJ, and a strange glow in the sea that acts as a powerful life force and upends Grace’s ideas of how the cosmos works. Framed as a response to a former student’s email, the narrative follows Grace’s journey from skeptic (she was a math teacher, after all) to believer in the possibility of magic as she learns to move on from the past. Her transformation is the book’s main conflict, aside from a protest against an evil developer intent on destroying Ibiza’s natural beauty. The outcome is never in doubt, and though the story often feels stretched to the limit—this novel could have easily been a novella—the author’s insistence on the power of connection to change lives comes through loud and clear.
Haig’s positive message will keep his fans happy.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593489277
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.
Ng selects 20 stories that illustrate why we might still read fiction in a time of disinformation and lies.
As the trials and tribulations of the 21st century have unfolded, the Best American Short Stories anthology has become a particular way of taking the temperature of each passing year. As Ng writes in her introduction to the latest group, “Short stories in particular can act like little tuning forks, helping us to clarify our own values—then allowing us to bring ourselves into alignment with what we believe. In a time when our values are being tested daily, it’s hard to think of anything more important.” Many of them are also fun to read, a quality appreciated more than ever by depressed and overwhelmed readers. The stories are ordered alphabetically, a structure maintained in the following selection, which is unfortunately limited by space. “Take Me to Kirkland,” by Sarah Anderson, is very funny, a little weird, and certainly one of Costco’s finest hours. “What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?” by Emma Binder is a cinematic mini-thriller about a trans kid visiting his hometown, terrified of being “clocked” by the people he grew up with after he saves a local from drowning. “Time of the Preacher,” by Bret Anthony Johnston, is one of several pandemic stories—in it, a snake, which may or may not be under the refrigerator, inspires a quarantine-breaking cry for help from a fence-builder’s ex-wife. Another story of that time, “Yellow Tulips,” by Nathan Curtis Roberts, also combines endearing, funny first-person narration with a more serious theme. A Mormon man in an uptight Utah suburb has to manage his developmentally disabled adult son through the complexities of quarantine. One day, he discovers that his son has “gotten into the provisions Mormons are all but commanded to keep, eating Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff from their jars.…Brig, we put these things aside for the apocalypse,’” the father says, while his son “grinned gleefully, sugary goo smeared across his lips and fingers. ‘It’s an apocalypse now!’”
The spirit of grace under pressure and creativity under fire animates a wonderfully diverse set of stories.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780063399808
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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