Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.
A collection of stories that examine coming of age, family, and Diné life.
The book opens with "Dormant," in which 17-year-old Bernadine becomes involved in a relationship with 24-year-old Aaron after helping him rescue an abandoned kitten. Bernadine considers her mother’s choice in men who are always “jailbirds” and what her future might look like with Aaron, a white man. “Interracial couples always had a hard time on the reservation, especially when the woman was Navajo,” she notes. This theme of the expectations imposed on Navajo women recurs several times; the stories look closely at the connections between self and community and also provide a view of reservation life and traditions. In "The Casket in the Backseat," a man gets a ride from a hearse and discovers his grandfather’s spirit is trapped in the casket. In "Snow Bath Season," a dead mother speaks to her daughter through Amazon’s Alexa. In the title story, a teen witnesses the disappearance of Miss Northwestern Arizona. These ingenious tales are rangy in their scope and form. “Under the Porchway” is notable for the way it interweaves plot with instructions for how to butcher a sheep. The author's sharp prose is amplified by extraordinary similes such as “roots clenched into the earth like wiry brown fists” and “veins clung in clusters beneath the skin of their hands like turquoise squash blossoms.” Not only are the metaphors and similes surprising, but the turns within each story are as well. Just when it feels like a plot might move into a familiar trope, it upends itself in the best way. The stories don’t provide tidy resolutions, but they reveal essential truths about the continued effects of colonization on Indigenous people, including the lack of resources on tribal lands, ongoing mental health and substance abuse crises, violence against women, and Indigenous women going missing.
Propulsive and complex, this is a gorgeously written debut.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781948814850
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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: yesterday
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
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