Muted ... Quiet ... A book unified by a gently plaintive tone, heavy symbolism and a reverence for Tennessee ... Siegrist gives tender treatment to these fragile, abandoned men and boys ... Politics are nearly absent from these worlds, but there is social context to be found in the deft details ... There is a strange sense of almost antediluvian time operating in this atmospheric collection, and intriguing hints at lives influenced more by myth than by history.
Siegrist shows a remarkable ability to evoke the missing pieces in his characters’ lives ... Even in the midst of the author’s piercing look into the human heart, however, there is humor, albeit dark ... With their universal themes, Siegrist’s folkloric stories have plenty of appeal.
Tender and pensive ... Transformative loss and fragile hope permeate these stories, which are filled with gentle, stoic, and fractured masculinities, eroding memories, dead-enders and last-chancers, widowed fathers, lost children, and dead, dying, and otherwise departed mothers. Though all proceed at a fairly homogenous drift-down-the-river pace and are suffused with an alluring but rarely variable eccentric Appalachian melancholy, author Siegrist's atmospheric, fluid, and merciful prose proves irresistible ... Moody and bittersweet: Save it for a literal rainy day and read in one sitting.
