Synopses & Reviews
Review
"What I love about this collection of stories is its wit and warmth. McConigley's characters are 'the wrong kind of Indians living in Wyoming,' and their struggles as exoticized and denigrated community members could be, in a less interesting writer's hands, yet another scolding tract on America's guilty conscience. Instead, this book celebrates human pluck and humor, a new sensibility for a new time, when everyone is both at home and utterly alien in the contemporary American west. A terrific read."
Antonya Nelson, author of Bound and Nothing Right
Review
"In this collection, McConigley understands the ways in which a place can unsteady and also shape us, and the stories reveal such grace and understated power that you know you are in the presence of an incredible new voice in fiction. And, like the best writers, she knows the exact moment to let wildness rush into the story and ruin us. I loved this book, every story a perfect piece of an amazing landscape."
Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang and Tunneling to the Center of the Earth
Review
"Beautiful, startling, poignant, Nina McConigley's stories invite us into a seldom-depicted landscape, peopled by characters we'll remember a long time, transfixed as they are between worlds, and racked by unnameable desires."
Chitra Divakaruni, author of Oleander Girl and One Amazing Thing
Review
"Nina McConigley crafts out of the Wyoming landscape a West few readers have known before — a place where, when you don't look like everyone else, there aren't many places to hide. And yet anyone who has ever felt a complicated kind of love for home, country, and family will find pleasure and wisdom in these stunning stories."
Eleanor Henderson, author of Ten Thousand Saints
Review
"You don't often read a book that shows you the world you think you know in a wholly unexpected light. Nina McConigley, a wonderful young writer, has given us a fresh and wise view of a new world — at turns delightful and sad, but surprising at every turn. I love this work, and I know it begins a fine career. Highly recommended."
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Queen of America and The Devil's Highway
Review
"Shove aside, Louis L'Amour and Leslie Silko! Make room on the shelf for Nina McConigley, who stakes her distinctive claim to the American West in this moving collection of stories that will hold you rapt with their humor and danger and sadness and fresh-eyed take on cultural, familial, geographic identity."
Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon and Refresh, Refresh
Review
"In these moving, emotionally complex stories, Nina McConigley gives us a world within a world most people don't even know exists. That world exists here, vividly so, and this writer's wise, wry, and savvy narrators deliver it to us in surprisingly rich and varied ways. This is an excellent debut. McConigley is a wonderful writer."
Brad Watson, author of Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives and The Heaven of Mercury