Review by Booklist Review
Too often, graphic violence in fiction is garish and showy. It takes a deft hand to portray the more subtle kinds of cruelties that shape these spectacular stories. Freeman (On Sal Mal Lane, 2013) possesses just that sort of talent, the kind that can massage touches of the unwelcome into everyday incidents to unsettling effect. Most of the primary characters in the collection are displaced from familiar terrain. In "The Bridge," a vein of menace lurks within a seemingly peace-loving, war-protesting school teacher. In "The Irish Girl," a Sri Lankan immigrant harbors a lingering crush on the Irish boarder who shared a slice of her home during his early days in the country. In "Matthew's Story," the main character treads on a different kind of foreign soil after the death of his dear brother. And in "Retaining Walls," a contractor's visit to an elderly couple's home strikes a raw nerve in the family. Set around the world and grappling with themes of race and class, Freeman's stories work precisely because they are full of the drama and the ordinariness of life. Here is proof that there is tragedy and beauty in the everyday; you just have to know where to look.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Freeman's delicate and vital debut collection (after the novel On Sal Mal Lane), characters examine their convictions and transform via relationships with others. In "Fault Lines," Mira, a Black mother from a Philadelphia suburb is presumed by her neighbors to be a nanny because her skin color is darker than her daughter's. In "The Wake," a girl named Silvia grows up in a New York City "mousehole" apartment, where she watches her mother, Rene, grieve over the death of a cult leader, her newly found spiritual practice "a riddle" that Sylvia "determine to solve." Don, a Sri Lankan cheese-making apprentice who lodges in 1969 Dublin with a woman named Madailein and her daughters in "The Irish Girl," learns about the city through Madailein, whose voice is equally admonishing and loving, and punctuated by a "nicotine-and-chocolate laugh." The story spans 33 years, and by its end, Don and Madailein "have grown toward each other." Freeman's charisma shines on each page of these beautiful stories. This is a treasure. Agent: Nicole Cunningham, Book Group. (June)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This short story collection methodically strips away the intricate layers of privilege, revealing the sometimes-sinister truth that no one is ever truly safe, regardless of societal status. With a cast of richly diverse characters, from immigrants to housewives and domestic workers, Freeman reveals the interpersonal dance of those who orbit around, or are beholden to, the middle class. "Retaining Walls" is about a contractor who transforms the homes of people with money while navigating a too-familiar intimacy from his clients and his conditioned emotional distance from his own family. In "Fault Lines," featuring three women whose lives intertwine, class tensions trump all: Mira, who is brown with White-presenting children, grapples with being otherized as she's assumed to be the nanny by a White woman, a fellow parent at their children's suburban school; Mira's nanny, Gabriella, wants to go back to school but is held back by her social circumstances, while Mira compounds Gabriella's situation with her passive-aggressive demands; and Iris, another domestic worker who is friends with Gabby, fights for sick days to attend her own children. In the book's most unsettling story, "Sleeping Alone," Sameera, a Middle Eastern immigrant, metes out a private insurgency on her romantic partner, a White professor of Middle Eastern studies, as well as his friends and colleagues in central Maine through a series of small, nonlethal, but devastating deeds to punish them for their unconscious biases about not only her country and people, but their refusal to truly see her. Each story is tightly structured and aimed to pierce through the reader's own sense of stability, which, while not always enjoyable, is certainly effective. Deceptively disturbing, deeply felt, and original, this collection will work its way beneath your nerves like a splinter. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
