![]() ![]() ![]() As the bereft narrator of the title story declares, the kind of love found in the Carolina hills-and in these stories-“demands tribute.” (Nov. I can't wait to share their story, their search for fulfillment and attempts to better understand their past and shape their future, with readers everywhere, and I'm jealous of all who will open to page one for. ![]() And not everyone (nor everything) makes it out alive. JJ, Ava and Sylvia are easy characters to fall in love with, and Stephanie Powell Watts brings them to life with warmth and generosity. In Watts’s South, people are trapped, by relationships, jobs, and flaws in their character, which can lead to a trap of a different sort: incarceration. A real emotional connection comes in a surprising form when she gets a call from a drug dealer who needs papers for his dachshund. In a strong debut, Watts chronicles in 11 stories the lives of black North Carolinians who come from or lived near the “dark houses out on tangled dirt roads on the fringes of the county.” Bright and witty 18-year-old Jehovah’s Witness Stephanie (Watts was formerly a Jehovah’s Witness minister) preaches door-to-door in the Pushcart Prize–winning “Unassigned Territory” and contemplates whether “To serve Jehovah during my youth (which, by the way, is the surprising twist ending to our magazine, Making the Most of Your Youth) or to go to college.” The choices aren’t so stark for Shelia, who in “Black Power” navigates widening gulfs between herself and her business-student fiancé, Polo, and Wendy, another black woman marooned with her as a customer support operator in the National Kennel Club cubicles. ![]()
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