Marry or Burn

Starred review from September 27, 2010
Trueblood's title sets the stage for a collection concerned with relationships and their perils, but these 12 startling tales of love and loss come as a welcome surprise. Trueblood (Seven Loves) catches the reader off guard from the start by opening with a story about a woman serving time in prison for murdering her husband. The stories that follow address relationships from refreshingly oblique angles: a teenage boy deals with his mother's infant son born out of wedlock in "Luck"; in the formally daring "Invisible River," a mother has an intimate dance with her daughter's ex-lover at the daughter's wedding. Secondary characters and narrative tangents envelope the larger plot and reveal hidden layers, resulting in a panoramic view of contemporary romantic rituals. Bracing honesty and elegant turns of phrase ("She put a lament into the name") mask the few moments when narrative details get lost. Trueblood's saturated prose imparts each story with a unique atmosphere and infuses the collection with an understanding that to love is to live, for better or for worse.

October 1, 2010
The many facets of marriage lie at the heart of this unique and thought-provoking short story collectionmarriages past and present, enduring or fractured. An apparently happy couple mourns the death of a friend, the wife secretly in love with him, even knowing his death was imminent. A young woman feels compelled to tell her soldier husband she has fallen in love with someone else with disastrous consequences. Later she marries a third man, and one of their daughters always refers to her mothers first husband as her phantom father. In Beloved, a widower marries a widow who took an ax to a bear that was attacking her first husbandthe first fact his grown daughters learn about their stepmother-to-be. And in Amends, a young woman who has killed her abusive husband and is imprisoned for 20 years continues to communicate with her mother-in-law. She becomes the old womans only visitor in her depressing nursing home, only to be confronted with her crime once again. Truebloods well-drawn characters may seem incomprehensible, but she succeeds in bringing them vividly to life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)