In Thon's overcooked collection, readers are run through a gauntlet of human suffering spanning slavery, the Holocaust, suicide, Vietnam, and abandoned children, focusing on a cast of broken characters seeking wholeness and redemption. Whether walking the frigid Boston streets with the drug addicts of "Nobody's Daughters" or languishing on a reservation, post-Vietnam, with Raymond Good Bird, Thon never flinches from exposing the wounds of her dejected cast. But this isn't just a play-by-play macabre parade; Thon imbues every sentence and character with care and craft, like Didi Kinkaid and the children she abandoned and returned to in "Heavenly Creatures" ("She offered herself to the strays, and the ritual of love made her really love them"). Thon (Sweet Hearts) can write a stunning sentence, and it's a strange criticism to say she writes too many of them, but with nearly every line striving for transcendence, the effect often becomes one of exhaustion. Obviously, every word was sweated over and each sentence polished to perfection, and while Thon's vision and sympathy for her characters is unparalleled, the unvaried high register she writes in could use a little shaking up. (May)
What a voice and vision Melanie Rae Thon has. Penetrating, unflinching, poetic and honest. She has created outstanding work over more than a quarter of a century, and it deserves to be recognized by a wider audience.” —CARYL PHILLIPS on Melanie Rae Thon
“The reader is swept along . . . by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch.” —The New York Times Book Review on Melanie Rae Thon
Thon's (English, Univ. of Utah) short stories have been widely published, including three in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, two of which are included in this collection. All have been previously published; six appeared in Thon's Girls in the Grass and First, Body, and three were recently anthologized. Moody and atmospheric, the stories are mostly set in stark environments: cold, barren winters in the Pacific Northwest or empty plains with little to break the monotony. Many of the stories feature lost girls and women. They are runaways and drug addicts, petty criminals and alcoholics, dear or dying. "In Nobody's Daughters," two sisters, one dead and one alive, are looking for a mother to take care of them. In "Necessary Angels," Dora lives at home with her mother and grandfather, but her real life is a secret. VERDICT The writing is graceful, at times poetic. Despite the harshness of the character's circumstances, the language will keep readers engaged. A great introduction to Thon's work.—Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. of Maryland, St. Mary's City
An unsettling group portrait of victimized young women whose survival on the margins of American life is its own best, or worst, reward.
Boasting three new stories and selections fromGirls in the Grass(1991) andFirst, Body(1997), this overview captures Thon at her tough, unremittingly intense, unflinching best. In settings ranging from Native American Montana to blue-collar Boston to a Georgia plantation in the 1850s, we are ushered into a bleak world of hard backseat sex and trailer-park traumas, unreported killings and numbing Vietnam flashbacks, heartless punishments and backcountry skirmishes that wouldn't be out of place on Elmore Leonard's Kentucky-set F/X series,Justified. "You have to believe something's going to happen" says the protagonist of one of the earliest stories, Iona Moon, but what happens in this book never lives up to her vision of bright lights illuminating the night. "Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer" is about a teenage girl who drunkenly runs over a Native American man and is forever haunted by efforts to conceal the crime. "Heavenly Creatures" is a multipart mini-epic about three half-siblings with different fathers and a mother in prison for fencing stolen bicycles. In "Punishment," a young female slave who witnesses a rape kills the baby she is brought in to nurse. Thon writes in short, jabbing, bruising sentences, never letting up on her verbal attack. Her words can be fiercely poetic or streaked with mysticism. If there's a drawback to her stories (she also has written four novels), it's that her thin-hipped, flat-chested girls are largely interchangeable. Only the source of their psychological scarring changes, ranging from incest to drug dependence to missing and/or alcoholic fathers and mothers. But that doesn't diminish the boldness or originality of this increasingly impressive body of work.
Bluntly powerful but deeply nuanced stories from a unique voice in American fiction.
