Tag Archives: High Country News

Book Review of Best of the West (for High Country News)

  By | |
Leave a comment

A Western State of Mind
Book Review by Tania Casselle of Best of the West 2009: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. Edited by James Thomas and D. Seth Horton

This impressive anthology showcases 18 stories from emerging writers and literary stars, selected from publications as diverse as The New Yorker and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Part of the pleasure in reading it arises from reflecting on what “The West” really means. What characterizes a Western story, beyond simply being set in the vast and varied lands west of the Missouri River?

Read the full book review at High Country News.

Book Review of Brian Hart’s Then Came the Evening (for High Country News)

  By | |
Leave a comment


Tough justice, hard fate
Book Review by Tania Casselle of
Then Came the Evening by Brian Hart

Vietnam veteran Bandy, believing his wife died in the fire that destroyed their cabin, goes crazy with rage and remorse and commits a crime that makes the reader gasp. Bandy, who’s also half-drunk at the time, ends up in jail but he was a damaged soul before the novel even opens. As we quickly learn, Iona isn’t dead after all. Pregnant with Bandy’s child, she left him for another man.

Read the full book review at High Country News.

Book Review of Rick Collignon’s Madewell Brown (for High Country News)

  By | |
Leave a comment


The Stories We Believe:
Book review by Tania Casselle of
Madewell Brown by Rick Collignon

Madewell Brown is the fourth novel in Rick Collignon’s “Guadalupe” series, set in an imaginary village in northern New Mexico. But it reads as a stand-alone, even while spiraling back to explore the fate of a character introduced in Perdido, the second in the series. It’s bold that Collignon, as an Anglo, writes intimately not only about Hispanic culture but then adds in an African-American to stir his fictional plot.

Read the full book review at High Country News.

Book review of Summer Wood’s Wrecker (for High Country News)

  By | |
Leave a comment

Good-enough mothers
Book review by Tania Casselle of
Wrecker by Summer Wood

In her second novel, Wrecker, New Mexico author Summer Wood draws on her personal experience as a foster parent. Wrecker is a bruiser of a boy who “seemed to need to feel his body collide with the physical world to know he existed.” He’s born and mostly raised outdoors in a story that is less about him than about the adults attempting to guide this troubled child through the wilderness of life.

Read the full book review at High Country News.