Heartbroke
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the California Book Award
From the acclaimed author of Godshot and “a pitch-perfect ventriloquist of extraordinary talent and ferocity” (T Kira Madden) comes a defining book of Californian stories where everyone is seeking or sabotaging love
United by the stark and sprawling landscapes of California’s Central Valley, the characters of Heartbroke boil with reckless desire. A woman steals a baby from a shelter in an attempt to recoup her own lost motherhood. A phone-sex operator sees divine opportunity when a lavender-eyed cowboy walks into her life. A mother and a son selling dream catchers along a highway that leads to a toxic beach manifest two young documentary filmmakers into their realm. And two teenage girls play a dangerous online game with destiny.
Heartbroke brims over with each character’s attempt to salvage grace where they can find it. Told in bright, snapping prose that reveals a world of loss and love underneath, Chelsea Bieker brilliantly illuminates a golden yet gothic world of longing and abandonment under an unrelenting California sun.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This wrenching collection from Bieker (Godshot) follows characters who wager on hope despite long odds and broken promises. In "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners," a bartender's aspiration to attend a community college writing class is thwarted by her miner boyfriend, whose increasingly controlling behavior echoes her family history. "Cowboys and Angels," about a naive phone sex operator who falls for a con man, is darkly comic, though overall the mood is one of fragile optimism that's easily shattered. In "Women and Children First," a woman whose own daughter has been placed in foster care seizes a doomed opportunity to nurture an addict's baby. In the title story, a grieving mother writes (but doesn't send) letters to her young gay son about the siblings he never knew, chasing an improbable desire to "feel my joy and know it was safe to feel joyful." Most stories are written in first person, their narrators giving vivid voice to the longings they still nurture despite everything. Throughout, Bieker's deeply human narrators bend the reader's ear with memorable stories.
