Sound of Holding Your Breath
Stories
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The residents of The Sound of Holding Your Breath could be neighbors, sharing the same familiar landscapes of twenty-first-century Appalachia—lake and forest, bridge and church, cemetery and garden, diner and hair salon. They could be your neighbors—average, workaday, each struggling with secrets and losses, entrenched in navigating the complex requirements of family in all its forms.
Yet tragedy and violence challenge these unassuming lives: A teenage boy is drawn to his sister’s husband, an EMT searching the lake for a body. A brother, a family, and a community fail to confront the implications of a missing girl. A pregnant widow spends Thanksgiving with her deceased husband’s family. Siblings grapple with the death of their sister-in-law at the hands of their brother. And in the title story, the shame of rape ruptures more than a decade later.
Accidents and deaths, cons and cover-ups, abuse and returning veterans—Natalie Sypolt’s characters wrestle with who they are during the most trying situations of their lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sypolt's uneven debut examines the best and worst of humanity in modern-day Appalachia, a vast setting that nonetheless highlights the mundane tragedies and joys of the people living there. Sypolt's characters are waitresses and pastors, younger brothers and sisters-in-law. They live in trailers and small houses with a lot of people, and they go to church or to a lakeside house for a week every summer, or to the Golden Egg, a diner that makes an appearance in many of the stories. In the gripping and exemplary "My Brothers and Me," Marianne returns home to deal with the aftermath, both emotional and legal, of her brother killing his wife, and asks of herself and her brothers, "Of what are you capable?" Sypolt's characters ask and answer this question for themselves over and over again, as when a young teacher visits a student and his family and finds herself inexplicably drawn to her student's father ("Home Visit"), or when a teenage boy must contend with how complicit he's willing to be in the increasingly violent relationship between his older brother and his girlfriend ("At the Lake"). Though there are some breathtaking moments, for the most part the stories never quite stick their landings, more often than not quietly stuttering to a stop, making this a sometimes promising but ultimately lukewarm collection.
