RaveThe RumpusBoggs’s stories are connected subtly and organically, filled with damaged creatures who live out their tough, wise-cracking existences in Virginia’s semi-rural Mattaponi River region — in its reservation and nearby towns... It takes Boggs twelve words to point to one of the themes of the collection: desertion ... As if to say all the fragile creatures of Boggs’s world — parents, children, husbands, and wives — dodge what dangers they can to survive in the midst of their aching loneliness. Sometimes they find grace ... Intimately familiar with the strange soil from which they grow, each of Boggs’s characters makes fine, heartbreaking attempts to do just that.
