Customer Reviews

Message to the Nurse of Dreams: A Collection of Short Fiction (Hell Yes! Texas Women Series)

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Lisa Sandlin is a gifted, idiosyncratic writer who fulfills much of the promise hinted at in her debut book "The Famous Thing About Death" in this surprising, well-crafted collection of tales set in small town Texas. With much humor, grace and insight, she manages to take small, sharply observed vignettes and turn them into revealing miniatures of a larger society shattered by racism, classism and confusion. Without hitting the reader over the head, she solidly makes her points, creating highly memorable characters and individual scenes in the process. If a few of the stories here feel artificial and too readily betray the author's pen at work, all of them, nonetheless, reveal a writer who is only in the first stages of what promises to be an important career.

Deeply imbedded in these stories is a sense of justice tempered with compassion....Her characters flail helplessly at "the way its done".. and perform their own rituals to restore a sense of dignity to their pridicament. They are rewarded with smal miracles; the Black disc jockey encountered during the late-night drive through the oil-derrick-dominated landscape who, from his brilliantly lit transmitter window, laughs and blows them a kiss. Laurie Macrae, The Workbook, Journal of the Southwest Research andInformation Center; winter, 1997

An excellent read, and an interesting discussion of race relation in the South during the 1960's. Sandlin offers rare insight into the psychology of people who struggle to deal with changing social conditions in the America South. She richly deserves the awards she has alreay garnered, and probably many more.aalexand

I chaired this prize judging, and it was a delight to come upon Lisa Sandlin's hot voice, her downhome 60's stories of racially mixed teens, her small town vibrations. She's a cool writer and this is a cool book.