Starred review from March 27, 2023
McIlwain’s impressive debut collection spotlights the hard-edged people who call rural western Pennsylvania home. In the title story, a father and daughter bond while fishing in a creek with reputedly healing waters. The girl’s mother has left them, and her father claims the water will help her endometriosis symptoms. In the luminous, Ovid-like “The Fractal Geometry of Grief,” a widower falls in love with a doe that seems to embody his late wife, prompting him to protect her from local hunters. The harrowing “Loosed” introduces Luke, a struggling egg farmer who goes from staging cockfights to dogfights, and finally and most lucratively pits his own four sons against each other in bloody hand-to-hand combat. “The Less Said” features a group of city-slicker deer hunters who frequent a local bar. After a tech-savvy volunteer at the local library finds internet videos of the group torturing locals, mainly young women, at their hunting camp, a group of seasoned and principled hunters evens the score. The author demonstrates the blessings and horrors of a close-knit community with great skill and understanding. Throughout, McIlwain’s reverent regard for the natural world makes her a worthy successor of Annie Dillard. Agent: Nicole Cunningham, Book Group.
April 15, 2023
A debut story collection set in the Appalachian Mountains. Like fictional Sidle Creek, wandering through rural western Pennsylvania, McIlwain's stories wind through the same country, touching down in the lives of locals. Here is the new widower in "The Fractal Geometry of Grief," besotted with a fawn who appears in his yard one day, trying to save her as he could not save his wife. Here's Tiller, the protagonist of "Shell," who can read the future in the natural world and one day discovers news on a red-winged blackbird egg that he doesn't want to know. Here's the closeted gay cafe owner in "Those Red Boots" who inadvertently puts his waitresses at risk by making them wear old cheerleading uniforms and sexy boots. Here, nature is restorative and healing. In the title story, a teenage girl tries to cure her endometriosis by placing stones from Sidle Creek on her belly: "I could feel the Sidle's love walking deep inside. It made me want to live." While fracking and mining are alluded to, the book seems blissfully (or foolishly?) disengaged from the climate crisis, as though there are still pockets of nature untouched by human activity. Still, McIlwain writes beautifully of the work that people do: the sawmill owner who knows "the type of the wood or how wet it is by the sound it makes when it meets the blade"; the farmer who "could handle overripened tomatoes without bruising them"; and the four tween girls who spend their summer caring for a woman with a high-risk pregnancy. At the same time, a few stories get invested in extending metaphors at the expense of illuminating human heartache. And while the conflict between amoral city men and vigilante country folk may flare up sometimes in real life, it feels tired here. Stories about a timeless rural America.
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May 1, 2023
In her short stories, McIlwain explores the joys, pains, and trials of ordinary people living in small-town Appalachia. Sometimes her stories are brief snapshots of life in Sidle Creek. In "The List," Hilly Luther calls for her priest to publicly read the names of the men in the town who have sinned, but she meets resistance. In her longer stories, McIlwain digs deeper into what it means to live in a working-class western Pennsylvania town--how people in this community take care and, conversely, hurt each other, and what it means to be an individual there. In "You Four Are the One," a group of sixth-grade girls form a support group to help a pregnant neighbor who is forced on bedrest after many miscarriages. In "Those Red Boots," the owner of a popular diner must reckon with the disappearance of one of his waitresses and the possibility that the culprit might be close to home. Though some of these stories are deeply rooted in the setting, McIlwain also excels at creating a variety of characters who could exist beyond Sidle Creek.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Starred review from December 22, 2023
DEBUT Pushcart Prize nominee McIlwain debuts with this LJ Best Book, an affecting collection of stories that plumb the hardscrabble life of Pennsylvania's mining, milling, and farming towns, where diners and bait shops abound. A father and daughter bond while fishing, which helps heal her health problems and a heart broken by her mother's leaving. A woman hopes for a baby after four miscarriages, while a husband builds a cherry-stained box that his wife icily rejects. A widower falls in love with a doe that recalls the wife he lost; he seeks to protect it from hunters even as his family worries about his mental health. Elsewhere, outsiders who have come for the hunting but instead wreak havoc are punished by the locals. VERDICT In fresh, bristly language, McIlwain captures rural life from a new angle. A surprising read.--Barbara Hoffert
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