"Belle Boggs infuses these stories of sometimes hardscrabble, dreams-deferred lives with a finely crafted, absolutely confident elegance. Boggs is a writer who knows how deep and how hard we can love and live. Her characters are too real to ever forget."
By now, [the shad] would have been baking for
hours, the bones soft and gelatinous in the tough salty flesh. Ronnie could
almost taste it, intense and rare, not like food at all. It was like love, she
thought. Something you thought you should have until it was right there in
front of you and you realized you were committed to it whole.
—from “Good News
for a Hard Time”
Set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and in
its surrounding counties, the stories in this linked collection detail the
lives of rural men and women with start realism and plainspoken humor. A young
military couple faces a future shadowed by injury and untold secrets. A dying
alcoholic attempts to reconcile with his estranged children. And an elderly
woman’s nurse weathers life with her irascible charge by making payments on a
decrepit houseboat—the Mattaponi Queen. The land is parceled into lots, work
opportunities are few, and the remaining inhabitants must choose between desire
and necessity as they navigate the murky stream of possession, love, and
everything in between.
“Strongly imagined, finely controlled, and well
crafted. These stories are good because they are true, true in that way that
only good fiction can be.”
—PERCIVAL EVERETT, Bakeless Fiction Judge, from his
introduction
