Synopsis
The richly textured stories in Janet Peery's debut collection nearly always depict people caught between two places - literal or figurative - or trying to understand the mysteries of a place in which they have found themselves and to apply that understanding to their lives. Whether the territory is cultural, sexual, or social, its bedrock is the heart.
In "South Padre" an Oklahoma farmer and his wife take a trip to the Texas Gulf Coast where they encounter a test of their marriage and - each in a different way - the limits of their knowledge. Set in 1950s Milwaukee, "Alligator Dance" depicts a fourth grader's sexual awakening as she is attracted and repelled by a Polish boy's totemic words, images, and their mysterious meanings, and by her own confusing desires. Eager to please her lawyer father, a young girl in "The Waco Wego" accompanies him to a meeting with a murderer's mother at a truckstop where she confronts the complexities of blame, morality, knowledge, and compassion. In "Nosotros" the daughter of a Mexican maid in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas, angered by her mother's subservience, is forced to examine her own relationship with the son of her mother's employer.
The title story was listed as one of one hundred distinguished stories in The Best American Short Stories 1992. Two of the stories received Pushcart prizes, "Nosotros" appearing in Pushcart XVI and "Whitewing" in Pushcart XVII. "What the Thunder Said" will appear in the 1993 edition of Best American Short Stories.
Reviews
Middle-aged men, young girls, and angry teenaged boys stumble across moments of rare grace--in ten moody, memorable tales set mostly in Texas and Oklahoma. In ``South Padre,'' a retired farmer and his wife drift apart only to discover themselves during a dreary vacation to the Gulf coast. In ``The Waco Wego,'' a small-town lawyer's prim adolescent daughter runs smack against her father's ethically complex, gritty world. The teenaged daughter of a Mexican-American maid in ``Nosotros'' learns why she should refrain from sleeping with the boy in the big house, while a fourth-grade girl in the title story is haunted by a dirty, disgusting male classmate who taunts her with sexual images. These are the best of Peery's richly textured pieces, whose heroes' outrage and frustration erupt sporadically against the arid backdrops of 1940's Oklahoma farmlands and Texas border towns until, in most cases, some kind of revelation is achieved. If the author succumbs at times to sentimentality (particularly in ``Mountains, Roads, The Tops of Trees,'' about a country girl's love for an older ``drunken Indian,'' and in ``Job's Daughters,'' whose gaggle of self-righteous Baptist cousins torture a California newcomer), her courage in plumbing the disturbing psyches of characters of widely varying ages, outlooks, and socioeconomic levels more than makes up for the occasional burst of affection. An unusually confident, mature, and moving debut. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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