A poignant and intelligent set of tales that effectively thematizes the importance of place.
Snodgrass presents a collection of linked short stories that revolve around a failed steel town in Western Pennsylvania.
As the author observes in a prefatory note, the once-booming steel mills in the Keystone State began to go bust in the 1980s, and with that lost prosperity, an entire way of life vanished. Here, he offers elegiac tales set in his struggling fictional town of Furnass, outside Pittsburgh; one of them, “Coda,” is a short story, while the others, including the titular work, are novella-length. In the first, Her Father’s Daughter, Jennifer Sutcliff seems set on severing her ties with Furnass forever; she reorganizes the real estate company that her father, Dick, built and controversially sells the land upon which he built it to an industrial park—a move that her mother feels is a dismissal of her father’s legacy. Jennifer then sets her sights on Pamela DiCello, the woman for whom Dick left his wife, and discovers a legal way to divest her of the trust Dick established for her. However, Jennifer finds herself moved by Pamela’s account of her relationship with Dick as well as her attachment to the place in which she lives: “I left a luxurious all-expenses-paid town house and way of life in upscale Seneca to live in this narrow frame insul-brick-covered hundred-year-old house in a dying mill town….This was my parents’ house, Jennifer; after they both passed I had trouble thinking about it just sitting here on its lonesome.”
Snodgrass affectingly portrays an increasingly obsolete notion—an unbreakable attachment to one’s home—in a world of peripatetic cosmopolitanism. However, the stories aren’t simply set pieces meant to present a philosophical theory; the author provides a powerful defense of locality by training his attention on a particular locale and not an abstruse polemic. Herein lies the principal strength of Snodgrass’ collection, in that he presents a series of protagonists trying to flee their homes but who are drawn back by powerful, if mysterious, forces. For instance, in the book’s title story, Allison Lyle returns to Furnass from Washington, D.C., in order to settle her recently deceased father’s “haphazard estate.” She hires local Kevin McCallum to clean out a chaotic, overstuffed basement; he’s depicted as essentially the opposite of Allison, as someone who’s so attached to Furnass that he labors to preserve its disappearing past. Allison finally learns that she never really knew her father; he had a secret life, one that was admirably honorable. But instead of pride, this discovery fills her with a “tremendous feeling of loss, a feeling that she had missed something important in her life.” It’s a revelation that Snodgrass movingly relates, and it’s one that readers will find especially poignant, as Allison lives something of a secret life of her own. Overall, this assemblage of stories is one that’s as timely as it is thoughtful—a meditative counterweight to stories by authors preoccupied with wanderlust.
A poignant and intelligent set of tales that effectively thematizes the importance of place.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73659-946-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Calling Crow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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 dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
