"The most compelling aspect of the book is the way a community’s collective voice seems to permeate each story....Pancake’s stories possess a rough beauty, and also an edge....these stories are worth the wait."—Orion
"Much lauded Seattle-based writer Ann Pancake has a remarkable gift for bringing West Virginia (her childhood home) to life on the page. This new collection of short stories and novellas includes vivid tales of working-class folks living amid the devastation of a type of strip mining known as mountain top removal. She imbues her characters with powerful, poetic voices, and unspools each story—of misfortune, family loyalty, long-held secrets—with a mixture of tension and mystery that unearths many strata of emotion." —Seattle Magazine
"Pancake's bravura tales carry the pulse of a betrayed yet beautiful place of loyalty and resilience." — Booklist
"Many of these stories by novelist Pancake (Strange as This Weather Has Been, 2007, etc.) are told from the perspectives of children and adolescents, the better to capture the eeriness of the Appalachian landscape and the folkways of the grown-ups who occupy it.…her ear for dialect is well-tuned, and the collection has its comic touches.…smartly styled…" —Kirkus
"…gritty, stylish assembly…well-crafted collection." —Publishers Weekly
"These are astonishing stories--tender, alive, full of heart and empathy but never sentimental, full of clenched drama and secrets and surprises but always subtle, full of knotty, poetic language, but also remarkably naturalistic. In her unflinching and lovingly accurate attention to the lives of the working poor, people who have fallen entirely beneath the radar of our literary notice, she occasionally calls to mind the haunting photographs of Walker Evans, but I don't think there's anyone else like Ann in American letters. She is a true original, and I urge with all my heart to read these gorgeous stories. Ann Pancake is one of the best we have." —Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake and Await Your Reply
"These are astonishing stories--tender, alive, full of heart and empathy but never sentimental, full of clenched drama and secrets and surprises but always subtle, full of knotty, poetic language, but also remarkably naturalistic. In her unflinching and lovingly accurate attention to the lives of the working poor, people who have fallen entirely beneath the radar of our literary notice, she occasionally calls to mind the haunting photographs of Walker Evans, but I don't think there's anyone else like Ann in American letters. She is a true original, and I urge with all my heart to read these gorgeous stories. Ann Pancake is one of the best we have." —Dan Chaon, author of Stay Awake and Await Your Reply
"In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, Ann Pancake writes her way deep into the marrow of one of America's wildest and most brutally wounded landscapes, and into the secret lives of its inhabitants, young and old. Her characters' dreams and misfortunes range from comic misadventure to haunting spiritual quest, and their voices, alive with hope and sorrow, restore lush color and rhythm to our lives. Like a water-dowser in thirsty times, Ann Pancake holds the divining-rod of language in her gifted hands, and reveals a mysterious world we can’t afford to lose." —Marjorie Sandor
Praise for Strange As This Weather Has Been:
"[P]owerful, sure-footed and haunting..."—The New York Times
"Pancake's novel is shockingly pure, like holding gold in your hands, or wheat--all the chaff winnowed away." — Orion Magazine
"Lush descriptions of the landscape are matched with a hurtling stream-of-consciousness narration to great effect: one doubts neither the characters' voices nor their places in a very complex poverty." —Publishers Weekly
2014-11-20
Rural West Virginia enters the 21st century but can't quite shake off its rough-hewn past in these 11 Southern gothic-tinged tales.Many of these stories by novelist Pancake (Strange as This Weather Has Been, 2007, etc.) are told from the perspectives of children and adolescents, the better to capture the eeriness of the Appalachian landscape and the folkways of the grown-ups who occupy it. At the opening of "Mouseskull," a fourth-grade girl makes a necklace out of the title object, a harrowing precursor to the tale of family ghosts that ensues. In "Coop," an 11-year-old girl witnesses a feral revolt at a rural camp. And in the concluding title story, the best of the batch, a toddler is emotionally buffeted by his drug-addicted father just as he acquires the words to push against him. Even from an adult perspective, the past looms large, as with the middle-aged woman who returns home in "Sab" to a land reworked by mountaintop removal and fracking or the dog hoarder in "Dog Song" who feels trapped by the encroaching housing developments that have wrecked the region's previous quiet. ("How you could kill a piece of ground without moving it anywhere," the protagonist thinks.) Pancake's tone in these stories is generally moody and sometimes too slowly paced; the opening novella, In Such Light, is overlong for the familiar tale of teenage heartbreak it relates. But her ear for dialect is well-tuned, and the collection has its comic touches. The superb novella Sugar's Up turns on a middle-aged man who's estranged from his wife and treated like an ATM by his son, and his rising fury at being passed over for a ceremonial hometown title is at once funny and reveals how maddening close-knit communities can be. A smartly styled, occasionally sluggish portrait of an undercovered landscape.
