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A review by book_concierge
Night at the Fiestas: Stories by Kirstin Valdez Quade
4.0
Ever since I studied O Henry and Edgar Allan Poe in junior high, I have loved short stories. With this collection, Kristin Valdez Quade is added to my list of authors who have perfected this format.
It’s difficult to rate a collection, because some of the stories resonate more with me than others. Quade gives us ten beautifully written stories in this collection.
In The Five Wounds Amadeo tries to atone for past (and current) failures by playing the part of Jesus in the annual Good Friday re-enactment of the crucifixion, while his pregnant teen-aged daughter looks on. Andrea struggles between hating the wealthy land owner who employs her father, and desperately wishing she could be more like his daughter, Parker in Jubilee. In Mojave Rats Monica is feeling trapped with her two daughters, seven-year-old Cordelia and the infant Beatrice, in a sparsely populated trailer park, while her husband is off doing fieldwork for his Ph.D. Pregnant Crystal has found work and maybe a little hope as a secretary for the local parish priest in Original Sins. When the reader meets Frances in Night at the Fiestas, “she is pretending to be someone else, someone whose father is not the bus driver.”
What Quade’s characters share is that desire to “be someone else” and/or somewhere else, but no real means of achieving that. They dream, but are somehow powerless to change their circumstances, falling back on old patterns of behavior, afraid to let go of their past to head into the future.
Quade’s short story collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award for John Leonard Prize in 2015, and Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (2016). She was named a National Book Foundation “Five Under Thirty-Five” Author.
It’s difficult to rate a collection, because some of the stories resonate more with me than others. Quade gives us ten beautifully written stories in this collection.
In The Five Wounds Amadeo tries to atone for past (and current) failures by playing the part of Jesus in the annual Good Friday re-enactment of the crucifixion, while his pregnant teen-aged daughter looks on. Andrea struggles between hating the wealthy land owner who employs her father, and desperately wishing she could be more like his daughter, Parker in Jubilee. In Mojave Rats Monica is feeling trapped with her two daughters, seven-year-old Cordelia and the infant Beatrice, in a sparsely populated trailer park, while her husband is off doing fieldwork for his Ph.D. Pregnant Crystal has found work and maybe a little hope as a secretary for the local parish priest in Original Sins. When the reader meets Frances in Night at the Fiestas, “she is pretending to be someone else, someone whose father is not the bus driver.”
What Quade’s characters share is that desire to “be someone else” and/or somewhere else, but no real means of achieving that. They dream, but are somehow powerless to change their circumstances, falling back on old patterns of behavior, afraid to let go of their past to head into the future.
Quade’s short story collection won the National Book Critics Circle Award for John Leonard Prize in 2015, and Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction (2016). She was named a National Book Foundation “Five Under Thirty-Five” Author.