An elegant, eco-minded collection of tales set in a Montana valley.
A debut novel in stories follows the rise of a Western town through the men and women who build it.
In a remote Montana valley, a community takes shape beneath a snowy crag called Crazy Mountain. A real estate agent seizes an opportunity to buy a massive ranch on the cheap, but flipping it turns out to be a bigger challenge than he bargained for. A wealthy couple from Los Angeles, still mourning the murder of their son, eventually buy the property, but their desire for uninterrupted nature is ruined by the trespasses of their “yokel” neighbors. A divorced man from Missouri uses his last bit of money to start a trailer park, but when he breaks ground on a convenience store to serve his residents, he’s unhappy to find what seems to be an Indigenous burial site. An older woman waits for her husband to die on their remote, snowed-in ranch, knowing she will have to dispose of the body on her own: “It took two weeks for Frank to finish dying.…After he took his last breath and there was nothing left but the body, she undressed him and wrapped him in a cotton sheet, trying not to focus on the miles of empty space surrounding her now that Frank was gone.” Across 15 stories that span from 1970 to 2015, Atchison relates the history of the valley as it develops from a lonesome ranch into a wildfire-threatened exurb. The author’s observant eye for nature makes her an especially adept chronicler of its decline: “Juniper tapped her brakes…when she saw the massive Aspen Springs Subdivision cluttering the sagebrush foothills where the elk used to graze in the bunchgrass all winter long. The hillsides had been taken over by cheatgrass and knapweed and the mountain slopes were stained with the rusty-brown hue of beetle-killed trees.” Each tale takes on a new character’s perspective, leaving the valley itself to serve as the book’s true protagonist. The result is a story collection with a novelistic sweep, capturing what is lost and what is gained in the development of the mountainous West.
An elegant, eco-minded collection of tales set in a Montana valley.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9854317-1-1
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Sowilo Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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