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Editorial Reviews
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Diane Roberts, May 30, 1999
[...] Mary Jane Ryals is particularly adept at the voices of children--indeed, most of the protagonists and first-person narrators are young girls. In "At the Other End of Nowhere, a flood ravages a Gulf Coast community as a child with a "silver-film eye" chooses to see miraculous metamorphoses rather than deal with barges piled high with the dead.
[...] Mary Jane Ryals is particularly adept at the voices of children--indeed, most of the protagonists and first-person narrators are young girls. In "At the Other End of Nowhere, a flood ravages a Gulf Coast community as a child with a "silver-film eye" chooses to see miraculous metamorphoses rather than deal with barges piled high with the dead.
This is a clever riff on [...] Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying"--"My mother is a fish"--and a kind of kid-surrealism at which Ryals excels. The angry, hurt, love-hungry and sometimes just plain hungry children in her stories string words together like they're willfully Crayola-ing outside the lines in a coloring book, infused with a sense of magic--sometimes beatific, mostly malevolent. [...]
Ryals' fiction sometimes echoes Carson McCullers or Connie May Fowler in the power with which she can enter the mind of a child in pain. "A Messy Job" is an impressive collection, as sweet-sour as the taste of mayhaws, as evocative as the smell of fresh-fried mullet.
Sundog: The Southeast Review, Selina Samuels, forthcoming Spring 2000
[...] In the hazy heat of the southern swamps, in the racial tension of the southern towns, Mary Jane Ryals explores stories of female adolescence and sexual and social awakening. These are painfully familiar. In "Bring Buffalo Punch" Lou Ellen tries to make sense of her father's infidelities, her mother's drunkenness and desperate sexual philandering. So she goes out, drinking too much, is felt up by a strange boy and finally finds herself with her mother, both drunk, disheveled and disappointed, in the 7-Eleven early in the morning. And yet Ryals finds great wisdom and peace amidst the sordid and sad actions of ordinary, confused human beings: "Someday I will fly off, but not like hair flying off. I climb the steps dizzy as a wobbly wig and open the door to the smell of rhubarb and strawberry pie homemade and finally feel a warm soak towards my bones. When I leave someday, I'll fly in a car with red lights, whiz-roaring through the highway. And I won't check the rearview mirror for a long long time."
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