by Jennifer Haigh
New features this year: -a return to judging which are the “best” (why not? I’m no more unqualified than anyone else.) -bonus features of Best of 1813 and Best of 2113. -the author’s original title for their book, if I was able to discover it. -I will disclose when my opinions are influenced by nepo...
I enjoyed this collection of short stories, but it reminds me so much of The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman that I just read a couple of weeks ago. Both contain stories that all take place in the same town over a period of years (except one in this collection) with most characters only showing up in o...
Methinks I like Ms. Haigh better as a short-storyist than as a novelist. This is a pitch-perfect collection of interconnected stories about a dying Pennsylvania coal-mining town. In my Forest Service days, I lived for awhile in a dying logging town, and the feel is much the same. Rumors take on the ...
I really liked this but wish I had reread Baker Towers first. Many of the stories are continued here and the earlier book is a bit hazy in my head.
The news is not always good.Jennifer Haigh, clearly mining a favorite seam, manages to hit the motherlode again in her new tales of Bakerton, PA. Her 2005 novel, Baker Towers, painted a three-decade portrait of the small mining town, from 1944 into the 1970s, focusing on the lives of its residents, ...
Haigh connects the “Bakerton Stories” in News From Heaven not only to each other, but also to Baker Towers, although I don’t think there’s a recommended order in which to read the books--the references aren’t plot-specific. Several stories revisit members of Baker Towers’ Novak family, both filling ...
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