A thoughtful and well-written collection with a strong sense of place and identity.
A volume of short stories gathers grim and touching moments of New England life.
Longtime New England writer Atkinson returns to fiction (following his 2015 history book, Massacre on the Merrimack) with a collection of tales set on both sides of the Massachusetts–New Hampshire border. The seven stories move back and forth across the Merrimack River and cover a variety of time periods, spanning the late 20th century to the present day. While many of the protagonists are blue collar, barely getting by or just breaking even, a few have made it to more stable circumstances only to discover that there will always be struggles, though they may take different forms. The title story, which opens the book, is one of the bleakest, a day spent with a man whose marriage, house, finances, and work are all in tatters, though a successful hunt brings him a small respite. “Bergeron Framing & Remodeling” is a twisted but moving family tale in which deep dysfunctions overlay the fundamental love between a father and his sons. “Hi-Pine Acres” is the evocative story of a widowed farmer with a layabout son who struggles with the decision to sell off land that has been in her family for more than a century. In “Java Man,” high school nicknames and relationships follow the characters into adulthood. The volume concludes with “Hoot,” in which a struggling singer/songwriter returns to her hometown, hoping that performing at a local bar will throw her career the lifeline it needs.
Life is precarious for almost everyone in these tales, even Thom McNulty of “Ellie’s Diamonds,” whose real estate ambitions offer him the highest earning potential of any of the characters, though he is also trapped in a cycle of debt. Atkinson is skilled at depicting small details that reveal much about his players—for instance, when Goody, the protagonist of “The Tree Stand,” brings down a deer, he quickly calculates how much the meat will allow him to shave off his upcoming grocery bills. One character has her “annual glass of wine” while doing her taxes; a neighborhood bar is replaced by a CVS. There are some delightful turns of phrase (one man has “two Kennedys’ worth of shiny brown hair”) and wry asides that succeed in being quietly funny but not excessively arch. Many of the stories are dominated by men who spend much of their time in predominantly male social and professional settings, but in “Hi-Pine Acres” and “Hoot,” Atkinson shows that he can also write fully developed female protagonists. While all the tales have their strengths, the book really hits its stride with “Java Man,” the first one written in the first person, which allows the author to explore his character’s view of the world from the inside, and he does so effectively. Characters, rather than the plots, drive most of the narratives, but Atkinson’s solid authorial voice and engaging writing style bring an intensity that is likely to win over many readers who would otherwise prefer their fiction with a bit more action.
A thoughtful and well-written collection with a strong sense of place and identity.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-60489-336-6
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
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.
