RaveBookslutMattaponi Queen, Belle Boggs's flawless debut collection and 2009 Bakeless Fiction Prize winner, contains a series of interconnected stories about the inhabitants of the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and bordering Virginia counties. It's the kind of place where people tend to settle with decades of secrets, even if they had once envisioned living somewhere else ... Boggs's landscape informs the tone of the stories and its protagonists alike. The reservation was just like anywhere else, trailers and double-wides and clapboard ranchers set on weedy lawns far off the black asphalt road ... Each of the stories in the debut collection can stand alone, something many writers aspire to yet few achieve with such success. The protagonists aren't merely hardscrabble people trying to get by, they're trying to make sense of their lives and where they fit in the space of the world beyond the neighboring counties.
