I devoured this collection of stories about small towns, back roads, first love, show pigs, college, and teens. First off I really appreciated the diversity in this collection: Black, LatinX, LGBTQ, indigenous teens, a wheelchair user, and teens from other walks of life really helped round out this collection and help make it fresh. Second off the authors all had compelling and heartfelt stories that grab readers attention with only a handful of pages. The stories, poems, and comics take place a...

Rural, for the purpose of this book, as defined in the introduction, “refers to belonging to a community consisting of ten thousand people or fewer that is a significant driving distance from an urban area.” As someone who grew up and continues to live in Iowa, this book was intriguing to me.  Many think of my state as a “flyover state,” with nothing to offer but corn and cows.  As such, I was drawn to this read and was not disappointed or even surprised by the stories each author brought to thi...

This is a beautiful anthology of texts exploring the stereotypes surrounding rural communities and the vast backgrounds of individuals who call small towns, countrysides, and a variety of quiet spaces their home. As a girl who grew up in a small rural town, I find my voice heard through so many experiences shared here. Perhaps some of the most poignant collections are the poetry/prose woven throughout the book. There are strong-willed characters, overarching themes, and the need for beautiful wo...

I'm really glad this is a short story collection that exists. This would have been something I loved in high school. Now there just need to be more novels that offer nuanced portrayals of young adulthood in rural areas.

Thank you Candlewick for a complimentary copy. I voluntarily reviewed this book. All opinions expressed are my own. Rural Voices By: Nora Shalaway Carpenter, et. al.REVIEW ☆☆☆☆As a person born and raised in the deep South, this collection is familiar to me. Where I live, there are rednecks, white trash, trailer trash, farm animals, backroads, poverty and places in the woods where no one goes. I understand how and why misconceptions exist about this part of the world and its people-it is like a d...

This is a Middle grades anthology which is wrongly labeled as being YA. There are few stories that could be YA but are also appropriate for middle grade readers and nearly all of this is pitched to the 14 and under crowd. The anthology seeks to dispel misconceptions about rural life in America. This is a subject that means something to me. After living my life in cities I moved to North Dakota for two years. I was in my 50's and I learned that much of what I thought I knew about being an America...

I’m a rural girl born and bred with a few very brief blips living in larger towns over the course of my 40 years ....... meaning this book was written for my heart. As with any diverse collection such as this, there will be winners and losers for every reader, but I was impressed that there was only one story I didn’t care to read in its entirety (skimmed) and despite one story that traumatized me, overall it is a super solid collection.The back matter with paragraphs written by the authors abou...

I live in a town of 700 people in rural Maine, and raised my children here. I truly appreciate the concept and execution of this anthology. The diverse stories give you a view into the lives and experiences of 15 different rural teenagers all from all over the country. I loved the variety of the storytelling— graphic stories, essays, verse and short stories. A great book for both rural and city readers.

THE (UNHEALTHY) BREAKFAST CLUB - 3/5 this was one nice but not very striking. it seemed a little bit self-indulgent and like a fictional dream where the underdog stands up to their bullies who immediately cower in shame and suffer from a lack of comebacks. it almost read like a c.2013 tumblr post where "and then EVERYBODY clapped!"THE HOLE OF DARK KILL HOLLOW - 5/5 this story knocked the wind out of me. this is EXACTLY what i wanted out of this anthology - it's like Costello wrote the short stor...

A perfect book to break some of my small-town blues. This was a bundle of nostalgia, and I loved it.

In Rural Voices: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions about Small-Town America (Candlewick Press, 2020), editor Nora Shalaway Carpenter, author of The Edge of Anything (Running Press Teens, 2020), presents fiction, poems, comics, and personal essays about the intersectionality of rural life and other identity issues, including race, poverty, mental health, physical difference, and gender orientation. Rural Voices includes established young adult authors such as Joseph Bruchac, David Macinnis Gill, a...

I had the luxury of growing up on the border of suburban and rural. We had county fairs and time told by crop rotation and country roads that can only be driven at insanely fast speeds. But I also was only 15 minutes from a town of 40,000 and had a high school class of 1500 kids. This book is both a taste of nostalgia and incredibly important in an era where we tend to paint rural living with large monochromatic brushstrokes. The diversity of experiences in these stories helps bring to light a v...

On my blog. Rural Voices for me is overall a good anthology. Each story brings something new to the table and there was a great variety of them. It’s just that there were only a few stories I had strong (positive) feelings about.The (Unhealthy) Breakfast Club / Monica Roe / 3 starsRep: wheelchair user character, Black character, Latina characterLike with many stories in this anthology, the opener is one that I liked, but I don’t really have much to say about it. It’s got well-rounded characte

I was really excited about this book- because often people living in small towns or in the country are discriminated against and looked down upon ( I can speak on that from experience), and this anthology pushes back against those stereotypes. After the 2016 presidential election, rural America was blamed for the results and quick judgments were made about them, so this enjoyable collection of short stories shows there is more diversity than people are aware of. If you are from a small town you

3.5 starsThis was such a cool idea for a book and I really liked it!! I feel like there were parts of this I could definitely relate to while other parts opened my eyes to what lay beyond the stereotypes of the word "rural." I think the one problem I had with this book was that it didn't feel as cohesive as it could have been. For example, I lost interest in some stories because I didn't feel like they were equally compelling as others (although that's probably just personal taste), or I just fe...

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of this book.I have mixed feelings about this book. With probably all anthologies, there will always be stories that you like and stories that you don't like. In this case, I the stories that I didn't like are actually overwhelming my thoughts right now. I have done the math though and figured out that my individual ratings would come up to 3 Stars overall. I have to be honest, I expexted a lot of stories like the first one. K...

This was a 3.5 for me, and it was way past time for a collection of 16 short stories, essays, graphic tales, and poems devoted to teens living in the rural parts of this country. That said, and considering that I did enjoy each one of these heartfelt stories, there weren't many things that surprised me about this collection. Maybe because I grew up in the country, as we always said back in the day, and never felt as though that lifestyle was somehow inferior to those who lives in the city, the s...

I loved this book! I got it for christmas and it was interesting because it (as the title clearly states) challenged my assumptions about people from rural parts of the US (and also in the South). Not only this, I also learnt a lot about what living in rural places is like and I learnt not to generalize anyone. I recommend this book to people especially that think of themselves as liberal, or leftist because there is certainly work to be done in terms of instantly assuming things when you hear "...

This collection of Small-Town America short stories hit the mark in terms of confronting many of the prejudices/expectations that are widely held about rural communities. I am guilty of many of these assumptions and was glad for the chance to have them called out. Like almost all of the collections I’ve read, there were great stories, pretty good ones and some I found meh. What sets this book apart, though, is that all of the stories are written by different authors with unique small-town storie...

As a former small-towner, I enjoyed this! It was a pretty quick, engaging read overall (some of my favs were "The (Unhealthy) Breakfast Club" by Monica Roe, "Fish and Fences" by Veeda Bybee, "Best in Show" by Tizah Price, and "Island Rodeo Queen" by Yamile Saied Mendez, while a few others didn't really click as much for me). I think it's always a little tough to get teens to pick up anthologies for leisure reading unless they have particular ties to the subject or are die-hard fans of specific a...