"Homeland and other stories" by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperPerennial, 1989)

• Homeland - Great Mam came to live with Gloria for 2 years in 1955. She belonged to the Bird Clan. She imparts wisdom to Gloria - e.g. "nobody is so hungry they need to kill a flower", and the idea that stars are small people. Gloria's dad decides Great mam (his mother-in-law) should revisit her roots. The family get in their truck and travel for a day or so. Gloria thinks Great Mam doesn't want to go. When they reach Cherokee it's like a film set, touristy. They go back home. Great Mam died not long after. At the end in the cemetery "Mother knelt down in her navy dress and nylon stockings and with her white-gloved hands thumped the flower stems impatiently against the jar bottom to get them to stand up straight. Already the petals were shriveling from thirst. As soon as we turned out backs, the small people would come dancing and pick up the flowers. They would kick over the jar and run through the forest, swinging the hollow stems above their heads, scattering them like bones." [I like it - especially the incidental details]
• Blueprints - Lydia and Whitman have downsized away from the city. They're about 30. She teaches about Evolution and Imprinting (how ducklings become attached to the first thing they see). He's a carpenter. The place is too small and they get on each other's nerves. In a storm a bridge he built falls down. She decides to leave him, then sees them breaking down.
• Covered bridges - The first-person narrator is a male botany prof, about 40. His wife's a toxicologist with an allergy to bee stings. She thinks they might want to start a family. They borrow a child (who's nearly 2 and can't walk) from a colleage of his for a night. They wonder if having children makes you feel immortal. She's stung by a bee and is rushed to hospital. The child makes its first steps. She decides that having a child makes you twice as mortal, and decides against having a baby.
• Quality time - Miriam, single mother of Rennie (5), works irregular shifts at a library so she has to be organised. She has a long discussion with Rennie about love and death, trying not to compare death with sleep. Did Snow White die? Did the prince kiss her full on the mouth like her mother's friend does? Miriam realises what Rennie's concern might be when she asks about who'll look after the dwarfs.
• Stone dreams - Diana, 39, teaches typing. She has a daughter Julie and a husband Nathan, an optician. She finds Nathan boring and is struggling with Diana now she's hit puberty. Diana's been having an affair with Peter (who makes furniture) for a while. She doesn't think it will last though she likes the sex. They have a chance to go on a trip together to a Petrified Forest. They argue - Peter has been putting condoms where Julie might find them. Diana finds a note in a pocket, put there by Julie. She writes that she knows about Peter and is ok about Diana leaving with him. Diana has a vision of the future with Julia and nobody else.
• Survival zones - Roberta (45) and Ed (50) have a daughter Roxanne (17). Roxanne's football boyfriend Danny has been offered a scholarship far away. She's unsure whether to go with him. Ed's mother had brought azaleas to Ed's house soon after they'd moved in. The climate's not quite right for them but they survive if cared for. Roxanne tells her mum that she's not following Danny straight away. Roberta decides it's important to preserve the azaleas.
• Islands on the moon - Magda, 44, hippyish, had Annemarie when she was 15. Annemarie has a son Leon who's father Buddy is no longer part of the family. Annemarie's not on speaking terms with her mother (though they live in the same trailer park) until she find's she's pregnant again. Magda's pregnant again too! Buddy says he want to remarry Annemarie. While Annemarie's driving Leon and Magda she crashes - her fault. She thinks Leon's dead but he's unharmed. Magda and Annemarie end up in the same hospital overnight with minor injuries. Annemarie "feels as if life has just been handed to her in a heavy and formal way, like a microphone on a stage, and the audience is waiting to see what great thing she intends to do with it". Later, Magma says to Annemarie that "Seems like that's just how it is with you and me. We're like islands on the moon." "There's no water on the moon," says Annemarie. "That's what I mean. A person could walk from one to the other if they just decided to do it"
• Bereaved apartments - Sulie, (who's on probation and does yard work) lives in half of a house. The other, separate half is owned by Gilbert. The house of Nola next door is run down - she's been there over 50 years. She thinks a man is stealing her things. Gilbert invites Sulie to his house. They help Nola assess her things. Gilbert steals a hat. Nola dies.
• Extinctions - Grace and husband Randall watch a TV program about the fate of pandas. Randall doesn't think it's too late. Next day, Grace drives her 2 sons to a family meal. The new pastor tried to hang Grace when she was 3. Grace's mother stopped him. He showed Grace rude magazines. Grace doesn't recall this, then memories start returning.
• Jump-up day - St. Lucia. Jericha's mother died before Jericha could walk. Her father got ill and had to return to London. She's looked after by nuns. They give her a bike to shut her up. In the village a strange man asks to see her again. He says that he helped ill people until her father - a doctor we now learn - got in the way. The man had summoned a Jump-up (a one-off spirit) to deal with her father but it didn't go away after its job was done. He wants the help of Jericha (who claims to be a boy). There's a ritual in a clearing. She says that it's her mother she misses, not her father. She loses consciousness and finds herself back at the orphanage where she releases a goat that's due to be eaten. [a different setting to the other pieces]
• Rose-Johnny - Georgeann is 10 with a 5-years-older sister Mary Etta. She's been warned about strange Rose-Johnny who looks after a shop with her father. When Georgeann sees her she looks normal enough. Her aunt says that Rose-Johnny's a Lebanese. Without telling her parents, she starts helping Rose-Johnny in return for goods. Rose-Johnny isn't a lesbian. She tells Georgeann that her "pa" is actually her grandpa - when her father died, her mother lived with a black man and got pregnant. The husband was lynched and hung. The baby was drowned. Her mother was raped and told her daughter to be the dead boy too. Rose-Johnny and her grandpa disappear. Dead? Moved away? Mary Etta is attacked - was she mistaken for Georgeann? Georgeann cuts her hair short.
• Why I am a danger to the public - The single mother narrator, a crane operator, is in jail. She'd been on strike. She'd been angry when Tommy, who she once fancied, continued working. His fiancee, Vonda, had come to her saying that Tommy had had an accident at work and had been whisked away. Vonda asked for union help. The narrator insisted that Vonda turn up at the picket line. She did, with a bat that the narrator took from her. Next day the narrator was arrested. Tommy wasn't injured after all.

Themes thread through the stories which are each about 20 pages long - women worrying about relationships; people's place in the world (and in the world of rocks, plants and animals); male vs female perspectives; parenting or deciding to be parents; furniture makers; ex-hippies. Gender politics too -

• in "Why I am a danger to the public" a woman's doing "a man's job"
• in "Jump-Up Day" the main character says that she's a boy.
• in "Rose-Johnny", a girl comes to admire a women who "was not, as we always heard, half man and half woman ... there was something not quite womanly in her face, but maybe any woman's face would look the same with that haircut" (p.204). Later in the same story "I knew, in a manner that went beyond the meaning of words I could not understand, that she was no more masculine than my mother or aunt, and no more lesbian than Lebanese. Rose-Johnny was simply herself, and alone" (p.218)

The latter quote shows how she sometimes "tells" rather than "shows", which is fair enough. Else when too, her characters seem more insightful and expressive than you'd expect - "I squeezed her hand to bring some strength into mine. I thought of the previous afternoon, of watching her, beautiful and permanent, against the continual loss of the Eel River. The things we will allow ourselves to believe" (p.59).

Her symbolism seems at times heavy-handed (or tightly coordinated, depending on how you view it) -

• A bridge, designed and built by the main character's partner to be nature-friendly, is destroying by nature. Their relationship is in trouble. At the end of the story "she climbs and slides down the slick boulders of the creek bed opposite him. She can't get any closer because of the water, still running high after the flood. "Whitman!" She screams his and other things, she can't remember what. She had hardly hear her own voice over the roar of the water. When he does look up she sees that he isn't hurt. He says something she can't hear. It takes awhile for Lydia to understand that he's crying. Whitman is not dead, he's crying. "God, I thought you were dead," she yells, her hand on her chest, still catching her breath" (p.40)
• In a story where the main character's father died because of infected water, the character sees a snake while she's cycling. Later, "On the deserted banana plantation the long drainage ditches, channels of infected water, shone like an army of luminous snakes marching toward the sea" (p.195). Snakes marching?

I like the details she keeps adding to sentences - e.g. "Mother made bologna sandwiches and we ate lunch in a place called Cherokee Park. It was a shaded spot along the river, where the dry banks were worn bald of their grass. Sycamore trees grew at the water's edge, with colorful, waterlogged trash floating in circles in the eddies around their roots" (p.18). Each story has sufficient description, characters, theme and sometimes plot to keep me reading.

Other reviews

• Russell Banks, New York Times (Of the 12 stories in this first collection by the author of the widely praised novel "The Bean Trees," all are interesting and most are extraordinarily fine)
• Kirkus (Kingsolver's stories are so sharply defined and deftly constructed that their lackluster endings come as a disappointment--they don't support all the talent that the stories contain. No crescendos here, then, but, still, a lovely repertoire)
• My reading life
• Laura Furman, LA Times (Kingsolver is most generous to her women and children, giving men more shallow characterizations. The men are annoying or ineffectual, problems for the women to solve. But all the children, male and female, are understandable and are magnets for the warmth of the women. I had the happy feeling halfway through this solid, readable collection that here is a writer who is telling us about characters in the middle of their days ...)
• bookaroundthecorner (Set in different States, they all have a literary family tie. Most of the stories have a female narrator, a little girl or a woman. They all feature characters and families from the working class and fathers and partners are often absent or useless. They explore the central place that women occupy in life and the ambivalence of motherhood. ... In several stories, an accident or a sudden death remind the characters that they are mortal. ... One of the stories I liked the most was Why I Am a Danger to the Public. ... She chooses to look at the good in people and she attaches a great importance to our link to nature.)
• Nasrullah Mambrol (Her narrators are mostly female or compassionate omniscient voices telling stories of homecomings, intergenerational misunderstandings, and mundane events such as scheduling errands or getting to know one’s neighbors. She pays close attention to the tensions that control events like Thanksgiving dinners and accurately captures the dynamics of husband and wife and of mother and daughter. In her stories, characters struggle to understand who they are in the context of family history and their present circumstances. The epiphanies of Kingsolver’s women are small but searingly personal. ... Kingsolver’s characters avoid the cynicism of many contemporary fictional voices, seeking instead a synthesis that will see them through or the moral vision that will allow them to rise above prejudices they cannot control. ... Kingsolver interestingly blurs the line between character and narrator by interspersing narrative passages with snippets of dialogue. Often the narrator’s contributions could just as easily be spoken by the main character; this shared quality underlines the universal relevance of private stories.)