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A review by mattdube
Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins
4.0
I thought this was a pretty remarkable collection of mostly-realstic regional fiction, in this case dealing with life in the parts of Nevada that aren't necessarily Vegas. People here go to Vegas, but they mostly don't live there.
There's a lot of sadness in these stories-- if you wanted to convince people that all contemporary literary fiction isn't sad, you wouldn't lean on this book, which is peopled with lovelorn twenty-somethings, mostly. But Watkins knows her way around a story, so one like "Virginia City" uses the location, an abandoned-then-rebuilt former silver town, in a couple different metaphorical contexts to position her story in the past and the present, and it works. Other stories are similarly as sophisticated in the way they deploy those "metaphors we live by." There's just a lot of good work here, in a very traditionalist vein, so much so that the opening story, about the narrator-author's connection to the Manson family almost feels out of place, or at least superfluous in a collection that would be really good without it.
There's a lot of sadness in these stories-- if you wanted to convince people that all contemporary literary fiction isn't sad, you wouldn't lean on this book, which is peopled with lovelorn twenty-somethings, mostly. But Watkins knows her way around a story, so one like "Virginia City" uses the location, an abandoned-then-rebuilt former silver town, in a couple different metaphorical contexts to position her story in the past and the present, and it works. Other stories are similarly as sophisticated in the way they deploy those "metaphors we live by." There's just a lot of good work here, in a very traditionalist vein, so much so that the opening story, about the narrator-author's connection to the Manson family almost feels out of place, or at least superfluous in a collection that would be really good without it.