Stygo

Stygo is home to Mama Jewell, who runs the foster home where Baby Annie primps and rants and Hallie lives life as a gremlin; Jack Stiles, who locks wild dogs in an old Chevy behind the Sweetwater Truck Stop; Billy Fiddle, the twin who's left to call everybody's bluff; Willa Moon, who has come home because no place else pays nearly as much attention to her; and a cast of children, powerful and wise, who know what to take from life and when to leave it alone.

Hendrie's lively debut chronicles the hopes and dreams of people living in Stygo, a small town in Bent County, Colo., surrounded by fields of sugar beets and tall corn. Most of its residents want to leave, and Tom Go comes closest when he wins a $500 lottery and his dream of moving to Alaska seems within reach. But his friends aren't fooled: "They knew where he would be in five or ten years. Some of them might not have known about themselves--a person can hang around a town all his life and not know about himself--but they knew about Tom." So it is with the other characters scraping out a living in these independent but closely connected stories; they know about each other. Lizzie, with her stuffed pet named Jubilee ("Armadillo"), knows that love is a chimera often glimpsed but rarely captured. Becca Jopa ("Arroyo") watches her brother Brice struggle to fulfill their father's expectations while he tries to tame a gray horse. Edie ("What Lasts") witnesses the wordless but enduring love her parents share in the days of her mother's fading sanity. The daily lives of these common folk gleam with light refracted through the prism of understanding wielded by this uncommonly gifted writer.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

These nine interrelated and somewhat uneven stories trace the lives of quiet desperation led by residents of the dusty Colorado town of Stygo. The strongest stand alone effectively, while others gain strength through context. Among the best is "Walking the Dog," which concerns Tom Go- so named because of his constant talk of leaving-and the conflicting emotions he feels when a lottery win allows him to realize his dream. "Something To Go By" deals with snowplow driver Billy Fiddle as he comes to terms with the death of Lee, his more popular twin brother. "Arroyo" is about the teenager Brice and Becca Jopa and the legacy of their father's obsessive quest to tame a wild horse. Hendrie has a hard, dry style well suited to her setting and subject matter. Recommended for larger libraries and regional collections.
Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Stygo is a gritty, busted-up little town in Colorado, where the rattlesnakes have heads "as big around as a man's fist." Stygo's main source of amusement is the Rockeroy Bar, and its main source of employment is the sugar-beet refinery. The social habits and hard circumstances of the kind of people usually termed "ordinary" have long been favored by American writers, but Hendrie treats such people in happily original fashion. The nine interconnected stories that make up her novel are told in a style that might be called exuberantly laconic. Its earnestness and energy are undercut nicely by a wit that reveals itself in the roll of sentences rather than sneering one-liners and in compassion--for instance, in the story of a young woman whose mother has run off with her baby sister, whose father keeps a car full of wild dogs to scare people away, and whose pet armadillo has been killed and stuffed--that isn't literary condescension, but rather evidence of real understanding and fondness. Gary Amdahl