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bradpar's review
4.0
If you are from Eastern Ky or have lived there any part of your life you will find this book resonating with your experience. The book, a series of short stories all bringing to life parts of the culture of mostly eastern Kentucky.
meghanc303's review
5.0
I can't recommend this collection highly enough. Mike is a friend and one of my best teachers, but even if he was none of these things, I'd be saying the same thing about this collection. There's a beautiful sense of place and temporality in each story that makes you feel the same sort of joy and sadness that you get with major life events--birth, weddings, death--and Mike excels as distilling the simplest image into emotional truth. The stories are loosely interconnected. If I had to pick favorites, "Slope" and "Smoulders," both featuring the character of Wren, stand out, both because Wren is in many ways and every man and in many ways highly specific, unique and precious. I love the plural narrators of "Diamond Dust" and the situational, small-town absurdity of "Solid Ground" and "Satellites." Don't sleep on this one.
toryhallelujah's review
3.0
The last two stories, "Washed Away" and "Satellites," were four-star stories. The rest of the collection was forgettable. My ARC didn't explain that they were basically all going to be set in one location (yet without any connections to each other, that I could discern at least) and that wasn't the kind of short story collection I wanted to read just now.
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