From Booklist
Each of these dozen stories is dedicated to an acknowledged master of American fiction, usually one best known for his or her short stories. Indeed, a particular story often seems to echo its dedicatee. The title story, dedicated to O. Henry, has a surprise at its ending. "On the Postcard Road" tells of a cross-country drive, as might be expected of a story "for Jack Kerouac," though the macabre circumstances of this trip seem like something perhaps out of Flannery O'Connor, the dedicatee of "Those Are the Terms," which, appropriately enough, is about sex and religion. "The Friends of the Trees" is "for Robert Penn Warren" and echoes his famous novel All the King's Men by being a political story, albeit one wackier and far smaller time than Willie Stark's career. What distinguishes those stories and the other six, too, is their magnetic readability, a result of Bonnie's skill at quickly limning utterly lifelike characterizations, incidents, and dialogue. These are fundamentally comic and optimistic stories, handled so surely that they can lunge toward sentimentality, as "Detecting Metal" does most daringly, and yet achieve emotional truth because everything in them rings so true. Bonnie is a peer of his dedicatees: read him. Ray Olson
About the Author
Fred Bonnie is a relocated Maine author, who's been living in the South for 25 years. His stories reflect the tension of that, among other things.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
