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Road of Five Churches: Stories
In this debut collection of short stories told in lush, humid prose, the protagonists are all young women, many of them teens, trying to survive extreme situations. There is Hatchet, accused by her Lakota brethren of being an FBI informer; Trout, a fundamentalist Christian with four children and another on the way; Kimchee, a Korean orphan; and Jasmina, imported from the Balkans for the sex trade.
In “Fire Maidens, ’57,” Monarch helps her father sick from the radioactive “death dust” kill himself. This is the above ground atomic bomb testing Nevada of the 1950s. “A Lynching in Stereoscope” is told in two first person accounts. Ciz and Jelly weave an interlocking narrative of a woman lynched in 1930s Arkansas and a home health aide who discovers that the elderly brother and sister she’s caring for did more than witness the event as children. In the title story “Road of Five Churches,” two grifters, a mother and daughter who wander the south selling bogus vacuum sweepers, are revealed to be a grown missing toddler and the woman who abducted her. “Amiga Mom from Planet Iraq” tells the homecoming of Sgt. Bethany Telecky, a disabled Iraq War Veteran, whose job was detonating bombs in a country wanting to “blow itself up into smaller and smaller bits of dirt and dust.” She loses her left arm and part of her face in an IED explosion.
An intense, lively read, often darkly humorous, these stories never fail to lyrically entertain.
In “Fire Maidens, ’57,” Monarch helps her father sick from the radioactive “death dust” kill himself. This is the above ground atomic bomb testing Nevada of the 1950s. “A Lynching in Stereoscope” is told in two first person accounts. Ciz and Jelly weave an interlocking narrative of a woman lynched in 1930s Arkansas and a home health aide who discovers that the elderly brother and sister she’s caring for did more than witness the event as children. In the title story “Road of Five Churches,” two grifters, a mother and daughter who wander the south selling bogus vacuum sweepers, are revealed to be a grown missing toddler and the woman who abducted her. “Amiga Mom from Planet Iraq” tells the homecoming of Sgt. Bethany Telecky, a disabled Iraq War Veteran, whose job was detonating bombs in a country wanting to “blow itself up into smaller and smaller bits of dirt and dust.” She loses her left arm and part of her face in an IED explosion.
An intense, lively read, often darkly humorous, these stories never fail to lyrically entertain.
Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 8, 2008
Just superb. Dickinson channels an extraordinary range of women characters in a way that is almost terrifying--except that it's so beautiful. Many of these stories are, in fact, terrifying. Dickinson is drawn to stories of women on the margins of society and women in particularly female forms of peril. There's a young fundamentalist Christian overwhelmed by almost continuous pregnancy, an Eastern European sold into the sex trade, a black mother whose son is ensnared by a mob intent on lynching him. There's plenty of violence here, but it's never titillating; Dickinson uses it merely reveal these characters and their situations most fully. And her protagonists are not passive victims but complex characters who meet the dangers they face in very different ways. Dickinson is a singular voice, a terrific talent.
January 5, 2008
I feel so strongly about this book of stories that even though I don't write 'official' reviews, I'm going to write one of this book and see if I can get it published somewhere--it's that good, and deserves that much attention. These are stories about women in desperate situations and how they deal, in short, but it's much more. Lyrical, evocative, hard-bitten, lovely, they make me feel as I understand the world a little bit better.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews