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You Only Get Letters From Jail (2013)

by Jodi Angel(Favorite Author)

3.74 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1935639579 (ISBN13: 9781935639572)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Tin House Books

review 1: If Elliott Smith had been raised poor in rural Northern California and had never scratched up enough money for a guitar, he might have been one of the narrators in this riveting first collection by Jodi Angel. Reading it, I thought of Steve Almond's advice about writing short stories: "Put your characters in the cave. Make them stay in the cave." Every subtle turn of plot takes each quiet, perceptive protagonist just a bit deeper into his own confusion about himself and the world. Whether the hero's spirit survives any of these stories is anyone's guess, but each hinges on something potentially revealing and shattering. The author's question in each of these tales seems to be, at what point do we need to bail from the train of our lives for the sake of our innocence? Lucki... morely for the reader, each narrator stays aboard until it's too late to do anything but hang on.
review 2: A powerful collection. Angel's style is deliberate and authoritative, with no wasted words, but it's not minimalist: most of these stories are lengthy, almost leisurely, and allow the reader real time to settle in. Angel lets us get to know small Northern California towns and the rural areas stretching beyond them, the roads passing through them. Roads and cars promise her teenaged male protagonists freedom and mastery, but freedom and mastery generally prove tricky to grasp. Still, one senses the resilience in these men-in-the-making. They are quick-witted, observant, sometimes roughed up by family circumstances, curious about the world's violence and still figuring out how to meet it. I love the way Angel's precise and controlled prose offsets the chaos her characters feel and see around them. less

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