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Girl Trouble, Holly Goddard Jones’ debut collection of short stories, resonates with black-coal sorrow and dark truths found in her native state’s deepest hollers. Put on a Keith Whitley album, one of Kentucky’s finest and most missed singers, and you’ll understand. Nothing is contrived; every story is steeped in reality, and clarity comes with a price. There are no great epiphanies for Roma, Ky.’s residents. Instead, what abounds are plenty of hard choices that make them swallow hard, make due, and move on, with plenty of quiet resolve—the kind that take place on a Christmas Eve at Walmart, where a widower surrenders another chance for love to help turn around his destructive son; or at a kitchen window, where a young divorced woman eats a Little Debbie cake and “…felt nothing, which was a kind of blessing.” Jones will read and sign Girl Trouble.
Mon., Sept. 28, 7 p.m., 2009
Mon., Sept. 28, 7 p.m., 2009
