Good Women

July 24, 2023
In Hill’s fierce debut collection, Black women hunger to escape from their lives. “Seeking Arrangements,” one of several brief and piercing entries, follows 20-something Krystall on a bus trip from Nashville, Tenn., to Florida with an older white man she met online. As their voyage progresses, Krystall imagines running away with the bus driver, a Black woman who endures racist slurs from another passenger. The excellent “Skin Hunger” revolves around Shauna’s unhappy marriage and social life with her and her white husband’s Presbyterian friends in Knoxville, who pressure her along with her in-laws to have a baby, prompting her to relish a week away to visit her sister in the Great Smoky Mountains. In the somber “Keeping Noisettes,” chaste middle-aged Lucille takes in a younger woman whose free spirit and beauty give her glimmers of how her life might have gone. Though Hill can be prone to repeating motifs, the collection not only coheres but progresses with its closer, “How to Cut and Quarter,” in which the grown daughter of a Seventh-day Adventist pastor faces her adulterous father’s duplicitousness after his funeral in Chattanooga (“Maybe he didn’t want to be known by me”) and reckons with memories of the church community she’d left for Atlanta. This heralds a bright new talent.

August 1, 2023
In her debut collection, Hill examines a troubled cast of Southern heroines. Though many of her protagonists are Black or Christian, and she pays sharp attention to what race and religion mean to each of them, these are not their most unifying traits. Rather, each woman is characterized by a sense of profound disappointment in herself, her relationships, and the outside world. Friendship is a bleak prospect, marriage even more so. The collection leans into drama, as Hill frequently chooses intrigue--particularly the threat of illicit lovers--over psychological depth. But it is compelling nonetheless, as Hill knows how to layer in just enough mystery and dread to keep readers invested. With a well-balanced blend of excitement and empathy, these stories are also able to handle darker topics without straying too far into melodrama. There are few clear-cut victories, but some of the protagonists are able to reach a moment of clarity about their place in the world. Ultimately, Hill has crafted a thoughtful, engaging entry into relationship fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 1, 2023
Twelve stories illuminate the lives of Black women in the contemporary Deep South and Appalachia. The vividness of the situations and personalities, the sparkling distraction of brand names and status details, the intrusion of technology moments like an Apple Watch pinging with a bill reminder at a funeral--all of these, plus a healthy dose of dark humor, act to make the full force of the dissatisfaction and anger that drive Hill's debut collection slow to be fully perceived. In the first story, "Seeking Arrangements," a young woman is on a Greyhound bus with an older white man she met on a dating site. Supposedly he "created Myspace before Myspace," though she can't verify this with Google. "He calls me his 'mutt' and 'little hot thing.' He says he's only teasing. He likes to chat on Yahoo! email. He thinks I'd look good with a shaved head." Now he's convinced her to travel 22 hours from Nashville to Florida to visit his mother in "a Presbyterian retirement community with gates that keep people like me out." She's minding his vast array of medication (he says he's too ill to fly) but in truth has no idea what she's doing there and fantasizes about running off with Lakeisha, the bus driver. The story "The Best Years of Your Life" is narrated by the admissions officer of an unaccredited university in a former Sears building, a woman who puts equal energy into luring student prey and excoriating herself for being involved with this scam. The people who come to her--like a weathered white woman who dreams of a law degree that will help her get her son out of federal prison--often believe they have received a sign. "That sign," she explains, "is nothing more than cache cookies tracking their 1 a.m. Googles: 'how to start over' or 'how to go back to school with a 1.9 gpa.' " This story is where the title phrase comes up, more or less as a knife in the gut. "You're a good woman," the "World's Best Meemaw" tells the narrator. "Your kindness is changing us, we won't forget it." Other characters are tormented by pregnancy (unwanted, ill-starred), weight control, evangelical faith, screwed-up mothers and fathers, and police brutality and are unable to find the comfort others do in Pema Ch�dr�n, nontoxic cleaning supplies, or White Claw. A stunning slow burn brimming with observation, emotion, and incident.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.