Heartbroke : stories /

Bieker (Godshot, 2020) flexes a gift for the short form in her searing first collection. Each story draws readers in, moving them to love Bieker's crusty characters before ending just in time to satisfy. Every engrossing piece takes place, as the stellar Godshot did, in California's rural Central Valley. The disenfranchised, impoverished, exploited, and manipulative characters are raisin farmers, sex workers, miners, mothers, addicts, and cowboys. In one story, a mother battling alcoholism kidnaps a baby from a women's shelter. In another, two ex-wives of the same man live together and care for one woman's disabled adult sister. A young gay man buries his sexuality to survive his father's rage. A teenager with a slimy stepfather and an internet boyfriend goes missing. In one particularly memorable piece, a PhD candidate arrives from out of town to write about violence against rural women, and becomes twisted in a desire to experience their trauma firsthand. The volume is turned way up on the corruption of these characters' relationships and the severity of their missteps; such big, loud behavior creates ample space to observe their pulsing humanity. Readers will get lost in this riot of a collection, like a sun-bleached fever dream.

This wrenching collection from Bieker (Godshot) follows characters who wager on hope despite long odds and broken promises. In "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Miners," a bartender's aspiration to attend a community college writing class is thwarted by her miner boyfriend, whose increasingly controlling behavior echoes her family history. "Cowboys and Angels," about a naive phone sex operator who falls for a con man, is darkly comic, though overall the mood is one of fragile optimism that's easily shattered. In "Women and Children First," a woman whose own daughter has been placed in foster care seizes a doomed opportunity to nurture an addict's baby. In the title story, a grieving mother writes (but doesn't send) letters to her young gay son about the siblings he never knew, chasing an improbable desire to "feel my joy and know it was safe to feel joyful." Most stories are written in first person, their narrators giving vivid voice to the longings they still nurture despite everything. Throughout, Bieker's deeply human narrators bend the reader's ear with memorable stories. Agent: Samantha Shea, Georges Borchardt Agency. (Apr.)

This collection of 11 short stories examines the extensive range of interpersonal relationships, from parents to partners to siblings. Each heart-wrenching story follows the melancholy mélange of flawed main characters through life, love, and loss. Subjects include poverty, abuse, murder, addiction, betrayal, and more, with only the backdrop of California's Central Valley to tie them all together. As the title implies, each story features unimaginable heartbreak, yet an undeniable glimmer of hope. Bieker (Godshot) uses her gritty writing style to craft character-driven storylines that are both alluring and agonizing. Even readers who don't relate directly to the events will come away with a deep emotional connection to the characters. Narrator Emily Durante defies the air of desperation and dysfunction with a sedate, even tone during the most fraught moments. Durante's straightforward presentation of the narrative complements the honest and open emotions of the characters. VERDICT This audio will appeal to listeners looking for a captivating but cumbersome narrative; full of strife but sprinkled with sanguine glimpses of optimism and ambition. Recommended for fans of Elizabeth Strout, Xhenet Aliu, and Neel Mukherjee.--Lauren Hackert

The down-at-the-heels and lovelorn of the American West battle addictions, exploitation, and abandonment. If Bieker's debut novel, Godshot (2020), were an acclaimed television series, Heartbroke would be its spinoff. These 11 stories feature Bieker's characteristic protagonists: naïve, mainly female, flattened by poverty, and desperate to cling to whatever helps make sense of the world or, rather, the corner of it Bieker retraces: namely, central California, where the bulk of these stories are set. (And in true spinoff fashion, characters from Godshot even pop up occasionally here.) Bieker hasn't let up on the drama any in these narratives, either; there is a Coen brothers--esque dark zaniness to their plots, which are full of hapless criminals and bumbling lovers, all filtered through lovely prose. ("I had me a cowboy once on a hot steam Friday night, on a hot go all the way time, just us together in his truck" reads the beginning of the heist tale "Cowboys and Angels.") In the opening story, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Miners," a college-age barmaid takes up with an abusive miner called Spider Dick and tries to figure out what her dead mother would have wanted her to do with her life. In the affecting "Lyra," a brothel madam hosts a young academic writing a dissertation about sex work and a long-ago crime that the madam knows far more about than she's saying. In nearly all the stories, the mother-child relationship is the beating heart, a heart that is shot through with the poison of poverty, substance abuse, and disenfranchisement. But that Bieker finds such humor and poetry in that heart is a testament to both her skill and her tender affection for her wayward characters. Larger than life and darker than hell. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.