Search Party

Starred review from April 8, 2013
The diamond-sharp stories in Trueblood’s second collection dazzle. In “Think Not Bitterly of Me,” Abby watches the present-day docudrama of her childhood kidnapping in the 1930s and wonders, “If your life was just any old thing, what made you keep at it?” Despite the obstacles thrown in their way by fate (one character is knocked unconscious by her lover; another is stabbed by her mother; another fights cancer), Trueblood’s characters do keep at it, searching not for meaning or answers, but simply for rest. As a young home health aide helping a 39-year-old man with MS puts it, “Your life was there, like your fingerprint, inescapable.” Yet moments of connection and grace constitute the rescue referred to in the subtitle, such as when ex-cop and school security officer Dooley talks a student out of shooting himself, in “Downward Dog”; and when a widower comes to accept his son’s disabled girlfriend Guadalupe, a woman “of whom he had been told and not told,” because her vulnerability matches his own, in “Guatemala.” Trueblood (Marry or Burn) tells these stories from unusual angles, with precision and a depth of insight and empathy that enfold the reader into the characters’ lives. Agent: Jessica Papin, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management.

March 15, 2013
An uneven collection that contains a few outstanding examples of the art of the short story. To say the collection is uneven is to recognize that the best stories are so strong that the average stories suffer by comparison. It is in the title story, the longest of the collection and packed with enough action for a novel, that the dispassionate narrator attends to several characters in a drama that, summarized, is a hit parade of woe: a lost child, madness, sudden death, suicide. "The Magic Pebble" is exceptional too. The strands of a life unraveled by illness are inspected separately. The narrator, a radio host, talks to and of the people around her on a charter flight to Lourdes (she is doing a story) of her son's difficulties at school and of the first trip she made after in-patient chemo. This little vacation to Lake Powell goes horribly wrong, and we wonder why Trueblood is not writing stories of fishing or whaling, so superb are her observations of icy, unforgiving water. She excels at the vignette. "Downward Dog," "The Stabbed Boy" and "Street of Dreams" are no more than four pages each, and yet they insinuate themselves with a minimum of detail--they resonate. The weaker narratives are clotted; there is an excess of observation, action, explanation. This is true of "Guatemala" and "The Blue Grotto," where the end seems another, less effective, iteration of the powerful end of "Search Party." Trueblood (Mary or Burn, 2010, etc.) is a writer to follow.

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May 15, 2013
There are no easy rescues in Trueblood's (Marry or Burn, 2010) newest unflinching story collection, yet characters still struggle to be saved despite the obstacles. A cancer-stricken radio host is on a flight to Lourdes in the contemplative The Magic Pebble, during which her interactions with her fellow passengers are interwoven with memories of her recent hospital stay followed by an ill-fated boat trip with her husband and young son. In Guatemala, a widower hosts his son and his son's girlfriend, Guadalupe, and becomes increasingly wary of his son's new love until their night of revelry reveals more than he first assumed. The memorable title tale follows the lives of sisters Susannah and Jo, including the repercussions of Susannah's disappearance as a toddler on the eve of Jo's birth. Among Trueblood's 13 stories, 2 of the shorter onesinvolving a cop turned security officer confronting a violent student and a homeless family roaming among empty houses for saleare especially striking as she piercingly captures glimpses of salvation that remain just out of reach.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)