Synopsis
A series of interconnected stories includes "Where the Devil Lost His Blanket," in which a woman is asked to transport a late stranger's ashes to South America and "The Dowry," in which a woman confronts her painful past during her father's final illness.
Reviews
The evolution of a landscape and its inhabitants binds together the tales in this eloquent, emotionally authentic debut, set in a fictional Pennsylvania river town. For the denizens of once-prosperous Tenney's Landing, the past remains at hand: prodigals both fleeing and returning explore the repercussions of childhood cruelties, tragic accidents and betrayals, as well as acts of kindness and heroism. "A clean break, wasn't that what she wanted? As if such a thing existed, as if fate might slip you a little silver hatchet and let you cut yourself free," muses the narrator of "The Springhouse," a woman who leaves her emotionally remote husband in Chicago and circles back to her parents' home. In "Jordan's Stand," a relative newcomer is appointed surrogate deer hunter by her elderly friend and neighbor, Jordan Eastman. Perched in a tree, she awaits her prey, pondering her husband's death and her new connections: "I think my widowhood draws us closer, as if the confluence of grief and old age were inevitable." Elizabeth Tenney, the protagonist in "Where the Devil Lost His Blanket," accompanies her Colombian neighbor's remains home to Bogotá in a story that highlights her provincialism at the same time it imbues her prosaic life with meaning. Rendered in graceful prose and abounding with epiphanies, Tudish's stories make a lovely, mournful collection. <
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In her prologue, Tudish establishes the accidental confluence of events that first led Revolutionary War veteran Lucius Tenney and four other pioneer families to settle at a bend in western Pennsylvania's Monongahela River. Such serendipity serves Tudish well throughout her collection of elegantly crafted short stories. Interconnected by virtue of their obviously shared location and subtly communicated common history, Tudish's stories follow characters as they emerge as protagonists in one tale and reappear as secondary players in another. Revisiting the lives of these subsequent generations of the town's founding families, Tudish limns an alluring portrait of a tight-knit community that, at times, threatens to become unraveled under deceptively innocuous circumstances--a wife's suspicion of her retired husband's activities and an elderly woman's disturbing memories of her son's childhood. By exposing and exploring the simultaneously fragile and tenuous bonds that unite family and friends, neighbors and strangers, rivals and allies, Tudish displays a pleasingly sublime combination of generously developed characters and scrupulously detailed settings in this dazzling debut. Carol Haggas
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