Love Stories in This Town: Summary and book reviews of Love Stories in This Town by Amanda Eyre Ward, plus links to an excerpt from Love Stories in This Town and a biography of Amanda Eyre Ward.
Love Stories in This Town
by Amanda Eyre Ward
Paperback: Apr 2009,
224 pages.
From San Francisco to Savannah, Montana to Texas, Amanda Eyre Ward’s characters are united in their fervent search to find a place where they truly belong. Annie, a librarian in a small mining town, must choose between the only home she’s ever known and the possibility of a new future.
Casey, a suburban New Yorker with a wry sense of humor, braves the dating scene after losing her husband. And in six linked stories spanning a decade of her life, Lola Wilkerson navigates elopement, motherhood, and lingering questions about who she wants to be when she grows up.
Whether exploring the fierceness of a mother’s love or the consolations of marriage, Amanda Eyre Ward’s stories are imbued with humor, clear-eyed insight, and emotional richness.
Ward’s stories offer entertaining, light reading punctuated by spurts of messy reality. The mix of heartache and humor, blended with sometimes outlandish circumstances will likely appeal to female readers like me, and most especially to those who are mothers... Negative and positive are nearly balanced in these stories and though we cannot expect the same in real life, this evenness makes for hopeful reading. (Reviewed by Stacey Brownlie).
The Miami Herald - Christine Thomas
The stories' unsettling and intriguing first lines rocket the reader into Eyre Ward's imagined landscapes. In the prosaically titled 'Motherhood and Terrorism' the initial sentences evoke a beheading and a baby shower
Los Angeles Times - Marion Winik
"She thought the baby shower would be canceled due to the beheading, but she was wrong."
If I were reading this review instead of writing it, those first sentences might be enough. They are filled with humor, intelligence and foreboding; they have freshness and frisson; they allude to cultural and personal moments I care about; they have a clean, seemingly artless delivery.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. Luminous work from a gifted writer.
Publishers Weekly.
Starred Review. The way Ward balances ruefulness and hope is singularly impressive.
Library Journal
Ward's often bewildered characters' efforts to keep trying to get it right is romantic courage at its most vulnerable. Strongly recommended.
Saudi Oil Communities
One of the stories in the Lola series finds Lola and her husband living in a Saudi Arabian compound for employees of the British Petroleum oil corporation. Oil companies have operated such managed communities in strategic areas of operation around the world for much of the 20th century and continue to do so today. Dhahran is the largest of four communities run by the Saudi oil company Aramco. Children of Aramco employees ("Aramcons") call themselves "Aramco brats," and their communities resemble military bases in many ways, with common areas, swimming pools, shopping centers, and schools. Aramco even produces its own magazine called Saudi Aramco World, which is published in the United States by an Aramco subsidiary. Fewer American and British expatriates live in these communities today than in decades past; in 2004, about 85% of the workforce was Saudi, compared to 60% in the 1970's. In a 2004 article, The New York Times covered expatriate life and cultural shifts in Aramco compounds.
Funny, heartbreaking, and alive with a potpourri of eccentric and irresistible characters, Broken for You is a testament to the saving graces of surrogate families, and shows how far the tiniest repair jobs can go in righting the world’s wrongs.
Devastating, evocative, and richly comic, Dark Roots deftly unveils the traumas that incite us to desperate measures and the coincidences that drive our lives. This arresting collection introduces a new master of the short story.
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