Review by Booklist Review
Following the success of her novels The Talented Ribkins (2017) and The Rib King (2021), Hubbard returns with this brilliantly rendered collection of short stories. The pieces take place predominantly in the American South from the late 1980s through the mid-aughts, and explore the Black experience of the time and place. One story captures the grief of a mother, selling frozen Kool-Aid to the neighborhood kids after burying her son. Another follows a representative from a fast-food corporate office as she visits the community center that the chain sponsors. A couple living in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina navigates the politics of post-storm investment during an uncomfortable sit-down with new neighbors. A lawyer opens his home to a client recently released from prison. Every character is dynamic, every world easy to slide into. The collection examines class and race at the turn of the century and how the politics of the era oppressed working Americans. As it does in her novels, Hubbard's deft hand for urgent fiction shines in every piece.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Hubbard's sweeping linked collection (after The Rib King) follows a Southern Black community through decades of inequities and unrest. In "Henry," set in 1993, the title character balances running a bar with advocating for his brother, Leon Moore, whose murder conviction eight years earlier was questioned by members of the community. A newspaper article once called their neighborhood "hopelessly blighted," as if its residents were to blame, but it was cut off from town by a highway project, and the police responded to dissent with violence, prompting Leon, before he was charged with murder, to form an activist group called Creative Unity Incorporated. "Bitch: An Etymology of Family Values" opens with Delia Montgomery, the wife of a Black councilman, receiving a call from a woman named Millie, who tells her about her affair with Delia's husband. Hubbard delves intriguingly into the complex feelings of the two women and their reactions to the situation along with other women in their lives, blending rich dialogue and various points of view. The title story finds Millie working in 2001 for the Leon Moore Center for Creative Unity, which gets a reputation for "lawlessness" after the name is tagged on buildings around town. Meanwhile, an auditor investigates some murky financial accounting at the organization. The final story, "Paulie Speaks," brings a poignant and tragic end to the Moores' story. Hubbard's engaging chorus of voices and well-drawn cast make this resonate. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Bearing Ernest J. Gaines and Hurston/Wright Legacy honors forThe Talented Ribkins and an LJ-starred review for The Rib King, Hubbard now offers a collection of stories set in a Black neighborhood in the South and dating from the Clinton to the Obama administrations. Involved fathers, grandmothers and granddaughters, cousins and uncles--all represent the close family bonds depicted here. With a 50,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Short stories brimming with societal nuance and human complexity offer a penetrating overview of urban Black America near the turn of the 21st century. In her previous novels, The Talented Ribkins (2017) and The Rib King (2021), Hubbard showed narrative ingenuity, tough-minded intelligence, and a refined sense of character in her depictions of African Americans swept up by history. These virtues--and, it turns out, many others--are on display in this collection of 13 stories set in and around an unnamed Southern metropolis resembling Hubbard's native New Orleans and arranged in chronological order from 1992 to 2007. "Trash," for example, is set in 2005, the same year as Hurricane Katrina, and, in dealing with characters coping with the storm's grisly aftermath, mentions many familiar landmarks and neighborhoods. The title character of "Henry" is a bartender who, in 1993, is struggling to keep his business afloat while helping to defend his activist brother, Leon, who was convicted of murder eight years earlier and has since become a cause célèbre in the Black community. A story set the following year, "Bitch: An Etymology of Family Values," introduces Millie Jones, who makes anonymous phone calls alerting a Black councilman's wife to her husband's extramarital dalliances. Millie turns up again in the title story, set in 2001, this time working for the Leon Moore Center for Creative Unity, which has been implicated in the vandalism of a hamburger franchise in the neighborhood. By the way, that story is the collection's centerpiece, not just for its novellalike length, but for the astute social observations, textured characterizations, and deep affection for its landscape that are emblematic of Hubbard's writing. Nothing seems lost or shortchanged in presenting this panorama of Black lives, whether disparities in social class, creeping gentrification, or the arduous, at times heroic efforts of even the poorest community residents to retain grace, decorum, and some autonomy over their surroundings. Hubbard's eyes and ears are in superb working order as she tells this besieged community's life story. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
