Following the divorce of her parents in the mid-1970s, teenager Jackie Stalnaker is sent away to live with her grandmother in the small town of Burnt House in central West Virginia. Not at all bored by the place, grateful to get away from her squabbling parents, and something of a snoop, Jackie is fascinated by the people she comes to know and is determined to discover--or at least imagine--all their stories and secrets. "Tragedies," Jackie reports. "Screw-ups. Cruelties. Bad, bad, sad things that nobody ever forgot, things people never talked about openly but only sometimes related in whispered hinting half-stories after dark." Burnt House is both the story of what Jackie learns about the town and of her own reaction to her increasing knowledge, a darkly comic, gothic exploration of a town and the people who live there--and an examination of the stories they tell and the histories they know.
Burnt House is gritty, witty, irreverent, and seductively sexy, conjuring characters who flee the town where they were born or retreat to it to escape the reality of their damaged lives. Burnt House becomes a portrait of a broken family whose saga is told through a series of intimate, closely-linked stories, storytellers who share gossip, secrets, love, and loss.
--Kathryn Lane, author of Backyard Volcano, Coyote Zone, and Waking Up in Medellin
History is always gossip in the town of Burnt House, and the past there is an old-fashioned crazy-quilt of off-kilter lives, sometimes criminal and often soul-crushing. This rollicking novel-in-stories constitutes a topographic map of the town's own secret truths. Lowell Mick White has given us characters who are lively, funny, memorable, deeply familiar, and always, always haunting.
--Patricia Bjorklund, author of US and Them: The Re-Enchantment of a Cold War Childhood
BURNT HOUSE
Published by Buffalo Times Press, June 2018
ISBN 978-1943306114
Available from AMAZON
Available from Barnes and Noble
Available from Powells
Burnt House is gritty, witty, irreverent, and seductively sexy, conjuring characters who flee the town where they were born or retreat to it to escape the reality of their damaged lives. Burnt House becomes a portrait of a broken family whose saga is told through a series of intimate, closely-linked stories, storytellers who share gossip, secrets, love, and loss.
--Kathryn Lane, author of Backyard Volcano, Coyote Zone, and Waking Up in Medellin
History is always gossip in the town of Burnt House, and the past there is an old-fashioned crazy-quilt of off-kilter lives, sometimes criminal and often soul-crushing. This rollicking novel-in-stories constitutes a topographic map of the town's own secret truths. Lowell Mick White has given us characters who are lively, funny, memorable, deeply familiar, and always, always haunting.
--Patricia Bjorklund, author of US and Them: The Re-Enchantment of a Cold War Childhood
BURNT HOUSE
Published by Buffalo Times Press, June 2018
ISBN 978-1943306114
Available from AMAZON
Available from Barnes and Noble
Available from Powells
