Stories about a timeless rural America.
A debut story collection set in the Appalachian Mountains.
Like fictional Sidle Creek, wandering through rural western Pennsylvania, McIlwain’s stories wind through the same country, touching down in the lives of locals. Here is the new widower in “The Fractal Geometry of Grief,” besotted with a fawn who appears in his yard one day, trying to save her as he could not save his wife. Here’s Tiller, the protagonist of “Shell,” who can read the future in the natural world and one day discovers news on a red-winged blackbird egg that he doesn’t want to know. Here’s the closeted gay cafe owner in “Those Red Boots” who inadvertently puts his waitresses at risk by making them wear old cheerleading uniforms and sexy boots. Here, nature is restorative and healing. In the title story, a teenage girl tries to cure her endometriosis by placing stones from Sidle Creek on her belly: “I could feel the Sidle’s love walking deep inside. It made me want to live.” While fracking and mining are alluded to, the book seems blissfully (or foolishly?) disengaged from the climate crisis, as though there are still pockets of nature untouched by human activity. Still, McIlwain writes beautifully of the work that people do: the sawmill owner who knows “the type of the wood or how wet it is by the sound it makes when it meets the blade”; the farmer who “could handle overripened tomatoes without bruising them”; and the four tween girls who spend their summer caring for a woman with a high-risk pregnancy. At the same time, a few stories get invested in extending metaphors at the expense of illuminating human heartache. And while the conflict between amoral city men and vigilante country folk may flare up sometimes in real life, it feels tired here.
Stories about a timeless rural America.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781685890414
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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