A wonderful collection. I liked every story.

I love this collection. It tells the story of so many women...no matter the race we all feel the same things at one time or another. Wilkinson describes these feelings beautifully. I had the chance to meet her at a Writer's Conference in Hazard, KY and I was very impressed with her spirit.

This is an absolutely beautiful collection of stories. The author weaves a perfect use of language and life into stories that made me want to stop and get to know them more deeply. I grew up in Appalachia and many of the stories took me back to simple moments I didn’t realize I had forgotten.I will note that there are possible triggers in this book, including sexual abuse (against children and adults) and physical abuse. Some moments were very hard for me to read and might be for others as well....

Every one of these short stories is brilliant. Crystal Wilkinson does such a great job at capturing humanity, raw emotion, and even little pieces of wisdom and beauty in her characters’ most ugly and painful situations. She puts the reader in plenty of uncomfortable spots, not knowing who or what to root for, and the themes are unapologetically dark. Be forewarned that there is lots of infidelity, sexual abuse, racial tension, and devastating loss on these pages. There’s lots to relate to for an...

This collection of short stories is a well-written, documented account of black Appalachian women. Their joys, sorrows, triumps and pain are articulated in a humananistic manner, very realistic and telling. Wilkinson has delved into the tenacity of women who perservere regardless of their circumstances and gender. True meaning of womanist.4-4.5 rating.

This was a collection of stories about Black life in Kentucky as seen through the eyes of the people who experienced it. Very good writing about the culture and lives as seen through the author's eyes.

I read this one gradually over the month of February. I'm still trying to get used to and love short story collections. As it turns out I loved this one. It is a series of short stories that turns around women and young girls. It has a southern drawl to it since it seems to be based in Kentucky. The author Crystal Wilkinson is from Kentucky. Each story contains themes that touch women to their core - sexuality, coming of age, child birth, relationships, racism, etc. The stories are as short as a...

4.75This may be the best short story collection I've read. Still surprised that this was Wilkinson's debut. Well-crafted stories with a southern twist.

Crystal Wilkinson says that being country is as much part of her identity as being black and in this short story collection she brings us stories about black women from rural south.It is a great collection, can't say that I disliked any of the stories. We look at these women dealing with different issues of womanhood (and race in some cases) while living in the country. In a few pages Crystal Wilkinson manages to bring us a well rounded character that touches us. Her language is lyrical, descrip...

This book is as important to the canon of Kentucky literature as any that has come before it. It is rich in character, and richer still in place and cultural experience. It magnifies how much more similar we country/rural folk are rather than different: every worry, every struggle, every joy regardless of color or economic status. Whether the reader is Appalachian, Southern, rural, black, white, mixed or none of these, there's more to be learned from these pages than one can imagine. Wilkinson i...

I try not to say this often so I won’t say it lightly—this is a very important book, with a sort of attentive brevity that you rarely see in work deemed “important.” In less than 200 pages, I felt overwhelmed by and completely aware of these characters, many of whom are the sort of long-suffering matriarchs and caretakers who rarely become the focal points of fiction. There are so many beautifully rendered moments of unexpected friendships, alliances, and romances here, ones that sneak up in you...

Crystal Wilkinson has managed to capture in this text a series of expressive, heartfelt, funny, sorrowful, sentient, and somber vignettes of life amongst folk in the wide open range and spread out places. The problems are the same, but there is a need for a community to draw together even with the distance of two counties between them.Each story reads like a snapshot. It reminds me of visiting my Grammy Kathy or Great Aunt Ethel and looking through one of their photo albums where each picture ha...

This is the second collection of stories by Crystal Wilkinson that I've read in a short period of time. Lyrical, tough, poetic, the setting of small-town Kentucky is vibrantly alive, as are the lives of these indomitable women, dealing with family, with memories, with love lost and found, with children to raise and jobs to go to, to finding their way in the present, as it's affected by the past. It all brims with life, and the intersections of gender, race, and rurality. These are stories too of...

Stories of womanness from girlhood to death and dying. Couldn’t love it more if I tried.

What I appreciated about these stories is the way that Wilkinson was able to draw us into everyone of her characters' lives and then really just give us these moments in such alluring detail. There is an inherent "life goes on" feeling about many of them and that whether it's a woman trying unsuccessfully to break the bonds of a controlling mother or another keeping a horrible secret from her mother so long that she finally breaks and kills her abusive husband and ends up in prison, these women

I first learned of Crystal Wilkinson while browsing a list of winners for the Ernest J. Gaines Award For Literary Excellence, a national award honoring rising African-American fiction writers. Wilkinson won the award in 2016 for her novel ‘Birds Of Opulence.’ This is her debut, a collection of eighteen weighty short stories filled with the voices and histories of “black, country women with curious lives.” Wilkinson’s prose is lean (“His eyes: shiny, the color of buckeyes”), sensual (“Her velvet

Wilkinson’s first book is a collection of short stories—perfect for my attention span just now! These stories feature Black women in rural Kentucky, young and old, each with her individual take on the world, her own idea of herself. In some stories, such as “Tipping the Scales”, we meet women who can’t be bothered by society’s conventions. A big woman, “not sloppy fat, though, ”Josephina Childs has “sure had her hands full in the men department most all her life.” All her life she’s been aware o...

One interesting thing about her stories is that every now and then one is told by a sort of spying, omniscent narrator that never participates directly. I've long wondered how much you can get to know an author from what they write. Surely the contents of the stories can be imagined, and therefore have little resemblence to the author. But what about these consistent storytelling characteristics?That being said, this collection features a wide variety of stories that feel like they could have ha...

I had to think a bit if this book deserved 3 or 4 stars. It's made of several short stories about black strong women trying to make a living in a tough world. Some short stories (eg. the first and the last ones) were pretty amazing and made me think a lot about what I would do in the same situation. Other ones weren't that good but got my attention anyway. I'm giving it 4 stars because I believe I will remember some stories and their unique characters for a long long time. Their stories are powe...

A compilation of short stories set in the rural South about the lives of African American men and women. The stories may be short but they are haunting and beautifully written. They are stories of love, fear, pain, acceptance, resignation, romance and determination. Not all the stories are pretty. Not all the stories are sad. But all the stories will leave a lasting imprint on your soul after you've read them.