Rutting Season
Stories
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
This sparkling collection of short stories explores the effects of loss, and the surprising ways people find to keep going, for “fans of Alice Munro and Marilynne Robinson” (Refinery29).
In these lucid, sharply observant stories, Mandeliene Smith traces the lives of men and women in moments of crisis: a woman whose husband has just died, a social worker struggling to escape his own past, a girl caught in a standoff between her mother’s boyfriend and the police. Wise and insightful, Smith is “an uncommonly talented writer with a particularly sharp eye for the serrated edge of human nature” (Publishers Weekly).
In “What It Takes,” a teenage girl navigates race and class as the school’s pot dealer. “The Someday Cat” follows a small girl terrified of being given away by her neglectful mother. “Three Views of a Pond” is a meditation on the healing time brings for a college student considering suicide. And in “Animals,” a child wrestles with the contradictions inherent in her family’s relationship with the farm animals they both care for and kill.
In barnyards, office buildings, and dilapidated houses, Smith’s characters fight for happiness and survival, and the choices they make reveal the power of instinct to save or destroy. Whether she’s writing about wives struggling with love, teenage girls resisting authority, or men and women reeling from loss, Smith illuminates her characters with pointed, gorgeous language and searing insight. Rutting Season is “an arresting debut short story collection…At once powerful and delicate, compassionate and clear-eyed, this book is sure to breed interest in a new literary voice” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Smith's unsettling debut, characters must confront the most basic, animal sides of themselves as they navigate crisis and tragedy, whether it is a husband's sudden death, workplace tension, or a police face-off. In the title story, Carl's boss Ray is constantly giving him a hard time, and one incident in front of Ray's work crush may be the final straw. "The Someday Cat" and "You the Animal" make for an intriguing pair of stories though they both center on the same climactic moment, they are told from two opposing viewpoints. In "The Someday Cat," Janie's siblings are being put up for adoption one by one, and so her mother brings home a kitten to placate the children who are left. In "You the Animal," readers meet Jared, who's about to be married and on the verge of quitting his job at the Department of Children and Families, which is where readers learn there's something a little more sinister at play at Janie's house. At their best, Smith's characters skate the razor-thin line of brutality in a way that's both chilling and compelling, although secondary characters too often come across as one-dimensional. Still, this collection proves Smith is an uncommonly talented writer with a particularly sharp eye for the serrated edge of human nature.