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dapho 's review for:
Battleborn
by Claire Vaye Watkins
I've never been to the West, which became vividly clear from reading these stories. The blanket of loss, profit, gold, or fame covered each story, met with the natural backdrop of dust and desert. Watkins ability to carry this setting across stories pushed this book towards a geographic anthology. I now am looking forward to an eventual trip to the American West.
Terrible heartache and loss accompany this cultural twang. These stories were nothing if not sad. Sad to the point of discomfort which made it difficult to find the endurance to move from one story to the next. I would argue that some of the stories felt incomplete. Watkins invests so much into each character that by the ending of her story, you feel a bit lost. It's as if someone pulled the emergency break when they arrived and didn't park or turn off the car. The endings were sometimes subtle, but always abrupt. It didn't affect me too much, as I continued to read the stories and even re-borrowed it from the library months later after only finishing half.
Terrible heartache and loss accompany this cultural twang. These stories were nothing if not sad. Sad to the point of discomfort which made it difficult to find the endurance to move from one story to the next. I would argue that some of the stories felt incomplete. Watkins invests so much into each character that by the ending of her story, you feel a bit lost. It's as if someone pulled the emergency break when they arrived and didn't park or turn off the car. The endings were sometimes subtle, but always abrupt. It didn't affect me too much, as I continued to read the stories and even re-borrowed it from the library months later after only finishing half.