Scan barcode
A review by jdintr
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
5.0
This is one of my favorite kinds of short-story collections: those that are unified in their sense of place. Following in the American tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, Willa Cather's Death Comes to the Archbishop, and John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven, Watkins claims her native Nevada as a landscape for some pretty incredible characters.
It's hard to pick a favorite from this collection, with stories set both in the present and during historic periods like the Gold Rush and the wake of the Manson Family murders. I would have to go with the final story, "Graceland," which is a perfect tapestry of storylines and themes that describe the inner lives of two sisters who lost their mother too young. Missing mothers is a theme of several of the stories.
In "The Last Thing We Need" Watkins unwinds the inner workings of guilt and memory in a series of letters written by a character to the owner of some artifacts he found dumped in the desert. Love in all its complications is a theme of both "Virginia City," which covers a true love triangle revolving around a free spirit named Jules, and "The Archivist," in which a woman struggles to let to of relics of a destructive relationship, most of all with the child growing within her.
The landscape and mores of Nevada are best found in "Rondine al Nido," in which two friends lose their innocense in Las Vegas, and "Man-O-War," another one of my favorites, in which a lonely prospector finds himself caring for an abused teenage girl.
It's hard to pick a favorite from this collection, with stories set both in the present and during historic periods like the Gold Rush and the wake of the Manson Family murders. I would have to go with the final story, "Graceland," which is a perfect tapestry of storylines and themes that describe the inner lives of two sisters who lost their mother too young. Missing mothers is a theme of several of the stories.
In "The Last Thing We Need" Watkins unwinds the inner workings of guilt and memory in a series of letters written by a character to the owner of some artifacts he found dumped in the desert. Love in all its complications is a theme of both "Virginia City," which covers a true love triangle revolving around a free spirit named Jules, and "The Archivist," in which a woman struggles to let to of relics of a destructive relationship, most of all with the child growing within her.
The landscape and mores of Nevada are best found in "Rondine al Nido," in which two friends lose their innocense in Las Vegas, and "Man-O-War," another one of my favorites, in which a lonely prospector finds himself caring for an abused teenage girl.