The last novella, 'Sarverville Remains,' is the longest and the best. The loner this time is the 30-something Geoffrey Sarver, a mentally disabled gas station attendant who finds himself at one corner of an unlikely love rectangle ... A hippie commune appears briefly in each novella, the only place they intersect, and it reveals something fundamental about each main character ... Read back to back to back, these novellas form a triptych — detailed works in their own right, they offer more than the sum of their parts when taken together. Weil meticulously imagines people and their histories, and presents them as a product of their places. This is perhaps the hardest thing for a fiction writer of any age, working in any form, to accomplish.
Weil's debut is a stark and haunting triptych of novellas set in the rusted-out hills straddling the border between the Virginias ... All three pieces, despite their somber tones, offer renewal for their protagonists. Taken individually, each novella offers its own tragic pleasures, but together, the works create a deeply human landscape that delivers great beauty.
Intimacy eludes the misfits in Weil’s debut, three novellas set in the backwoods of Virginia ... ['Ridge Weather' is] a superficial story, leaving us wondering about the causes of the father’s suicide and the son’s ingrained isolation ... The third entry, 'Sarverville Remains,' though too long and cluttered, has an undeniable power ... Weil’s empathy for his damaged people has not yet found a compatible narrative.
