Review by Booklist Review
This debut, a collection of connected stories set in the American West, offers a wonderful, meaningful experience to readers. An older nun struggles to believe that God wants the mountaintop fracking her young pastor supports, so she takes action. A daughter is losing her father--to post-stroke confusion--and the Gunnison sage grouse she believed they were both vested in protecting. The fourth child of a young mother who needs to get out of her marriage is born in a ghost town. The stories rise above on multiple levels: rich settings both integrated and essential, compelling characters navigating life's most formative crossroads, the tapestry effect of skillfully woven elements, and emotional intelligence in breathtaking spades. Consider this observation about a younger coworker by a man who is father to a dead son and husband to a wife in permanent assisted living: "He couldn't realize how much of life was the luck, good or bad, that flowed out of the crap choices you made before the stakes were clear, before you knew how to properly care for the things you held dear." Boyles both respects the intelligence of her reader and brings heart and soul to the page.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Boyles's debut collection bristles with intelligence and determination as her characters face the harsh realities of the American West, from the 1970s to the near future. In "Ledger," a rancher's daughter grapples with her father's stroke and selling their land, which protects a grouse native to the area. Other stories trace domestic fault lines. In "Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars," a woman reckons with expecting a baby while in an unhappy marriage, and "Early Warning Systems" tracks a marriage's dissolution. "Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012" features a nun who takes a stand on fracking, and "Lost Gun, $1,000 Reward. No Questions," follows two brothers en route to see their dying father. The linked "Flood Stories," "Natural Resource Management," and "Best Response to Fear" explore the lives of three sisters and their children, one of whom is a police officer convicted of falsifying evidence to incriminate people, including his best friend. At their best, the stories of women dealing with messes men left behind evoke the characters' grit and hope as well as a sense of place, colored in by their concern for the environment. Fans of Annie Proulx and John Sayles will love this. (June)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Moments of reckoning both personal and environmental are centered in this debut collection of lightly linked stories set in the American West. A trio of sisters are central characters in a number of stories: There's Ruth, a pregnant mother who gets a job in a Nevada ghost town to earn enough money to take her children back to her home in Colorado ("Alto Cumulus Standing Lenticulars"); Mano, who realizes a construction company is regularly poisoning the fish in the local river and that her city department plans to cover up the spills ("Early Warning Systems"); and Sister Agnes Mary, who is compelled into action when a new priest agrees to let drilling take place near their parochial school's playground ("Sister Agnes Mary in the Spring of 2012"). In "Ledgers," an ornithologist-turned-caretaker forced to sell the family ranch to pay for her father's medical bills grapples with the new owner's callousness toward the endangered Gunnison sage grouse that returns to the land yearly to nest. Such loyalty to an area is called "site fidelity," a concept that gives this collection its name and throughline: What does it mean for our survival and well-being to be deeply interwoven with the fate of a place and to be aware of its unsustainable trajectory? And what actions are we willing to take when other people don't feel the same sense of urgency and connection? Set against a larger backdrop of energy debates, environmental disasters, and climate change, Boyles' stories are skillfully layered explorations of the politics and power plays within families, workplaces, and communities. Yet this collection's true mastery is in the rich and varied voices of the characters and in the small moments in which they reach for hope despite all that has crumbled around them. Deliberate and compelling. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
