Battleborn

Starred review from May 7, 2012
The people in Battleborn are wounded yet compassionate, despairing and lonely, but always open to a hug, a kiss, a way out, a way in, or a fleeting moment of companionship. These aren’t characters in stories, but human beings perpetually yearning for warmth. Fortunately, this book contains many stories because I read them for days. Claire Vaye Watkins has apparently sprung fully formed into the narrow pantheon of young writers willing to take narrative risks, eschewing trend and style for depth and wisdom. Entering the varied lives is akin to watching a tightrope walker high overhead, moving with steady confidence without a net. I found no missteps, no wobbles, no hesitations. As every story ended, I exhaled a long breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
Watkins writes with precision and care, the sentences themselves as surprising as the events, the dialogue, and the spare description. On a purely formal level, these stories shatter the forward motion of time. They move easily and readily from the present to the past and even to the near future. For lack of a better term, there is a purity to the prose that is a constant pleasure to read.
Watkins makes beautiful art by embracing the rigors of the short story form, considered the most difficult in literature, then tossing out the rules and inventing some of her own. She blends history and fact with fiction to create a new mythology of the American West—the untold stories of people seeking connection with the past, the land, and each other. There is great originality in these narratives. I was deeply moved by the core of emotion within each story. The settings are fresh—desert, brothel, ghost town, casino, a series of letters. But the generosity and personal sacrifices of the people are as universal as the stars at night.
Chris Offutt is the author, most recently, of No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. He lives in Mississippi.

August 1, 2012
Ten stories, carefully and lovingly constructed, about Western characters as prickly as barbed wire. The epistolary story, "The Last Thing We Need," chronicles the letters of Thomas Grey to one Duane Moser after the correspondent finds a lost stash of prescriptions, a collection of letters and an abandoned '66 Chevelle out in the desert. "Rondine Al Nido" uncovers a young woman's secret shame. If there's an anomaly in the collection, it's "The Diggings," a story about the Gold Rush of 1849 and the madness of greed. It's a fine story but feels out of place among those that surround it. There are two here that are flat-out outstanding. "The Archivist" is a spare, unflinching story about the desolation of loss. "There was no salve for the space he left," is an amazing opening line for this heartbreaker about a woman building a shrine to the flimflam man she loved and lost. Watkins builds a fully formed world in "The Past Perfect, The Past Continuous, The Simple Past," in which a beautiful young Italian boy wreaks emotional havoc on the workers of the brothel he stumbles into by accident. Gloriously vivid stories about the human heart.

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March 1, 2012

Short stories can be a hard sell in public libraries, but this one merits a good look. As Watkins sweeps from Gold Rush to ghost town, she captures the American West persuasively enough to have been snatched up by agent Nicole Aragi, who takes on only one new client a year. And though one hopes that the personal will not overshadow the page, Watkins's backstory--her father was an important member of Charles Manson's "Family"--will spur interest.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2012

This debut collection takes its title from the author's home state, Nevada, so nicknamed because it achieved statehood during the Civil War. This setting, from Death Valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, from Virginia City to Las Vegas, is likely unfamiliar to most readers, and that strangeness adds to the collection's appeal. The stories cover a large chunk of history and a lot of ground, from the failed mining efforts of the forty-niners to Charles Manson's debauchery in his desert enclave (Watkins's father was a Manson associate) to the near-present with a legal brothel known as the Cherry Patch Ranch. The characters include small-town teenage girls looking for fun on a Vegas road trip (and instead finding danger) and a young Reno woman with a destructive streak who takes up smoking on the night she meets a man at a bar over a game of video poker. VERDICT Readers who have enjoyed the work of Annie Proulx and Joan Didion will find much to admire in this arresting collection, which one hopes is merely the first stop along the way for a writer who deserves a sustained literary life. [See Prepub Alert, 1/30/12.]--Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.