Richard Currey (1)

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The lives of the working class in West Virginia—a train engineer, an epileptic, coal miners and outlaws, the fragile and dispossessed—are explored in this powerful yet tender collection of six short stories and a novella. They depict an isolated world of hardship, human endurance, and hard-won dignity and are a lyrical rendering of times and places now largely gone—but the stirring clarity of people and landscape can persist in the reader's imagination.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA LIBRARYTHING EARLY REVIEWERS. THANK YOU.

My Review: The novella "The Love of a Good Woman" reminds me of Flannery O'Connor's Southern Gothics. All of the stories are set in West Virginia, so should we call it "Appalachian Gothic" just to be clear? You're missing a trick if you don't procure one for yourself because it's rich, involving prose that tells really honest stories about people's real lives...love, family, the curdled joy of intimacy all get their inversions here. There's something very Lewis Nordan, in his Wolf Whistle mode, about the whole collection. Recommended.… (meer)

It's hard to know what to say about this book. I read it quickly in one sitting, feeling that was the best way to get the most out of it. It was like a montage...in which scenes from the Vietnam war came forward and then retreated. The scenes came from the thoughts and sights of the author, a medical corpsman ("Doc"). I was most touched by his interactions with Maldonado, a Cuban-American who lost a leg in this war. Other scenes were not quite as straightforward. Most of what I read was gruesome. War is gruesome. Then it was quietly over for "Doc" who returned home to grow old, but never to forget what he experienced in Vietnam.

Not a pretty read, but deeply moving.… (meer)

Richard Currey's writing style is beautiful. It is inspiring almost despite the settings and types of characters he depicts in these stories.
Though I have long wanted to, I have never visited this part of the country but this book and others of its ilk can make me feel like I have. These are not happy stories overall, but understanding the people and their times make them enjoyable.
I have been on a bit of a short story jag lately and this is one of the better collections I have read. Recommended.… (meer)