Debut author Claire Boyles’s new collection Site Fidelity includes ten stories that come, deeply, from place. Boyles’s places strike me not so much as architectural—though they do serve structural purposes within the fictions—but as abundant natural resources that Boyles lovingly mines. Her settings exist as characters in their own right, carefully detailed, possessed of complex backstories, and imbued with definite, sometimes dangerous, agency ... In some cases, place provides not plot but rich detail—raw material that Boyles uses to create her characters’ layered interior landscapes ... Boyles seems to prefer the more naturalistic impression of an unresolved ending, but sometimes the avoidance of resolution can feel a little like a dodge. But that may be a novelist’s complaint, one that masks underlying praise: I wanted to stick with these vivid characters and settings all the way, to live through their problems until justice was done or comfort found ... Site Fidelity pines for its lands, too, testifying to their beauty and power while alerting us to their fragility, reminding us of the importance of paying attention to place.

Claire Boyles’s collection of short stories, Site Fidelity, seamlessly fuses the lives and struggles of ordinary people in the American West with the wider challenges of living in a natural environment stressed by climate and economic changes ... Boyles has written stories of surprising range, while maintaining a focus on how human beings—particularly men—are imperiling our planet through careless exploitation and short-term economic goals. She also deftly marshals a number of themes we traditionally find in literature about the American West ... despite a gripping sense of a world out of joint, Boyles never completely gives up hope that we can work to heal both our human and natural world, and offers hints of reconciliations and resolutions that leave the reader both thoughtful and challenged.

That balance between hope — or acceptance — and forbearance factors into all 10 stories in the collection, which offer an unrelenting clarity. These are characters that don’t deceive themselves, even as they try to see the good, or at least the tolerable, in what they have ... This is the real stuff, adulthood at its most complex, in which we often find ourselves complicit even when we’re not at fault. Boyles makes the point explicit by linking several of these stories in a pair of overlapping cycles, one involving Mano and her sisters and a second built around Bobby’s community. It’s a strong decision, grounding the book within its landscape and making the stories bigger, more connected, than they might appear on their own ... That none of this will be resolved should go without saying. Life is open-ended until it stops. Boyles weaves such knowledge deep into her narratives, choosing to end many of them in the middle, in the moment just before the trouble starts. It is a deft and daring choice ... The questions Boyles is raising are universal. How much do we matter? What is a single lifetime worth? She doesn’t sugarcoat the answers; the communities in Site Fidelity face problems that are intractable and growing worse. All the same, she wants us to consider: What else do we have?

This debut, a collection of connected stories set in the American West, offers a wonderful, meaningful experience to readers ... The stories rise above on multiple levels: rich settings both integrated and essential, compelling characters navigating life’s most formative crossroads, the tapestry effect of skillfully woven elements, and emotional intelligence in breathtaking spades ... Boyles both respects the intelligence of her reader and brings heart and soul to the page.

These are stories not just of the environment, but humans and one another. Boyles is writing about the ecosystems that form our lives. The natural events that shape us. She asserts: the land matters ... Boyles writes beautifully ... There is a feeling of eco-shame in the book: We should feel bad for what we have done to our environment. But there is also a sense of hope ... Site Fidelity calls on us to change. It asks us to reimagine our relationship, our duty to the landscapes of our lives ... This is a book for readers who understand that we have caused rapid weather cycling, warmer temperatures, melting ice caps, etc. This book is for the modern library. A library that does not ignore this truth, but instead embraces it.

Claire Boyles carries on the rich tradition of writers such as Annie Proulx and Pam Houston, whose fiction emerges from the sweeping western landscapes. Set across the backdrops of rural Nevada and Colorado, the stories in Site Fidelity are intimate and quiet, with many unfolding through internal character developments and striking, poetic glimpses of a world in flux ... she uses her settings in their fullest form. Place in Site Fidelity operates as both a noun and a verb, an active participant that is just as likely to leave its mark on the characters as they are to it; it’s metaphor, yes, but it’s also the hero, antagonist, and victim. Place is the history, culture, and way of life that grounds these characters and make their stories possible ... Site Fidelity is a delight to read at the sentence and individual story scale, but it truly becomes a marvel when viewed as a collection ... Claire Boyles’s Site Fidelity is both an impressive debut and necessary addition to climate fiction. Her collection reads simultaneously like poetry and history, fiction and nonfiction.

Boyles has tapped into a largely untouched goldmine of stories about environmental issues in the American West, and the people involved in the often-lonely fights for their jobs, their land and their resources on a changing planet. By writing this book, Boyles provides a peek into the fascinating world of niche environmental policy that is usually perceived as too dull and complex for most people to care about ... Boyles is a Coloradan and a former sustainable farmer, and it’s immediately apparent she knows what she’s doing, both as a writer and an environmentalist. The book is heavily character-driven, but every story takes place amid a fairly complicated setting involving environmental issues that don’t typically get a lot of attention in fiction. Boyles deftly explains these situations without coming across as dogmatic, connecting problems that might seem theoretical to people whose lives are immensely impacted by them ... an impressive collection of stories that exudes kindness and warmth for its characters and a clear passion for its central thesis ... Boyles crafts beautiful sentences easily, and the dialogue is realistic and illustrates genuine relationships between characters ... However, it’s necessary to point out that this book does little if anything to challenge the predominantly white face of environmentalism and environmental writing. It’s curious that a book about human attachment to—and destruction of—land and nature fails to even tangentially mention the genocide of indigenous people from the very spaces Boyles writes about so endearingly. It is especially disappointing that this collection looks at environmental crises and climate change from a colorblind lens, when its effects are so racially disparate. Given the diversity of characters and themes in the book, it is disheartening that she didn’t include the perspectives of indigenous people and other people of color who are already being severely impacted by the climate crisis ... Despite these omissions, Site Fidelity is a solid debut collection by a writer to watch out for. It is a noble pursuit to challenge the traditionally masculine mythology of the American West, and I have no doubt that Boyles cares deeply about the environment and the nitty-gritty details of land management debates. Even as the climate crisis is visibly worsening, there remains a group of skeptics who aren’t swayed by traditional reporting. Creating fictionalized stories about these urgent but often inaccessible issues might be the best way to drive change from people who may not otherwise be inclined to care.

Moments of reckoning both personal and environmental are centered in this debut collection of lightly linked stories set in the American West ... Set against a larger backdrop of energy debates, environmental disasters, and climate change, Boyles’ stories are skillfully layered explorations of the politics and power plays within families, workplaces, and communities. Yet this collection’s true mastery is in the rich and varied voices of the characters and in the small moments in which they reach for hope despite all that has crumbled around them. Deliberate and compelling.

Boyles’s debut collection bristles with intelligence and determination as her characters face the harsh realities of the American West, from the 1970s to the near future ... At their best, the stories of women dealing with messes men left behind evoke the characters’ grit and hope as well as a sense of place, colored in by their concern for the environment. Fans of Annie Proulx and John Sayles will love this.