Best Revenge : Short Stories
ISBN: 9781611685183
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of New Hampshire Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Fiction; Literature;

``Hardscrabble'' is not only the name of the imprint, but also a good description of the lives of many of the protagonists of these stories, some of which appeared in the author's first collection, Wood Heat: Stories from Up North (Nightshade Press). Here is the stuff of classic New England life: small-town politics (``the last of the blood sports''), feuds between lakefront neighbors, a rain-soaked Little League game, checking trap lines in midwinter. Rule has an unerring ear for idiom and inflection, and her characters' voices are spot-on, whether they're the participants in a school district meeting in the wickedly funny opener, ``Yankee Curse''; a phlegmatic old loner who meets his match in the rueful ``The Widow and the Trapper''; or the child narrators of the poignant ``Three'' and ``MaryMay's Eyes.'' The best of the stories finish on an unexpected yet thoroughly satisfying note. However, some of those at book's end, particularly ``Saturday Night at the Hi-View Drive-In,'' ``Bonfire'' and ``The White Room,'' seem to just stop mid-beat, making them more like character studies or fragments of longer works than self-contained pieces. Still, this is a solid offering from a graceful and versatile writer. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Named "Best Emerging Writer" by the New Hampshire Writers and Publishers Project, Rebecca Rule is book review editor for the Concord (NH) Monitor and a summer writing instructor at the University of New Hampshire. She is coauthor of Creating the Story: Guides for Writers (1993) and author of Wood Heat (1992).

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