"A high school basketball coach learns that his star player is pregnant—with his child. The nightmare of a college student's rape and murder is relived by both her mother and her killer, whose contradictory accounts call to question the very nature of victimhood. In these eight stories, the fine line between right and wrong, good and bad, love and violence is walked over and over again."
Before I get started with my actual review, I want to be up front about all my "connections" with the author, because I am aware that these things might possibly have influenced my reading of this collection. (I do think my opinion would be the same without the connections but still, in the interest of full disclosure...)
Jones taught in the MFA program at Murray State University, which is where I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees (and where I'm currently employed and working on my Rank 1). At the time I got my B.A. in English with a minor in Creative Writing, she was not part of the faculty and we didn't have the MFA program that we currently have. So that's one connection.
The second is that Jones grew up in Russellville, KY, which is home to two of the schools that I currently serve with the Gear Up grant for which I work. That's another connection.
Normally, a collection of short stories like this wouldn't have kept my attention; it's not that I don't have any appreciation for work like this, because I do, but stories in this vein -- Southern, literary, realistic, dark -- are less and less my cup of tea as I get older. (An aside: This was really the only type of stories we were expected to produce in my short story workshops as an undergrad, and I fought against them -- and the professor's notion that genre fiction could not be "literary" -- tooth and nail.) But I was interested, because I knew Jones had taught at MSU and I knew where the stories took place.
The regionalism of the stories drew me in -- it's such a neat thing, in my opinion, to recognize all the places where a story takes place; it's a spark of connection that I can't deny, you know? But it was Jones' writing, her characters and the sweeping play of despair and hope and determination and love and poverty and humanity that kept me reading. I did more than recognize these places; I recognized these people. While Jones' stories take place in and around Logan County/Russellville, they just as easily could have taken place in Hickman County, where I was raised. These people are people I knew, people I went to school with, people my parents worked with, people I am related to. I mentioned before that the stories are dark, and they are; two of them ("Parts" and "Proof of God") offer two different sides of a story, one based on the murder of a young girl in a dorm on WKU's campus in 2004.
Overall, it's an excellent collection, and Jones is a talent to watch. I'd love to see something longer from her. The current paperback version also features an interview with Jones as well as some of her favorite quotes from Kentucky authors in a P.S. section at the back of the book.
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