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The people in these eight interlaced stories are "bound together by the worst sort of grief," the kind that can devour you after someone close takes his or her own life. Wednesday evenings in Hope Springs, Oklahoma, offer the usual middle American options: TV, rec league sports, eating out, and church. For Slater, Holly, and SueAnn, it is the night their suicide survivors group meets. They once felt little else in common, aside from a curiosity about Jane, the group facilitator, but now they understand how deeply they need each other.
SueAnn mourns for her son, who hanged himself. Slater is left impotent by the loss of his father, who deliberately overdosed on pills and alcohol. Holly can't let go of her boyfriend, who shot himself. But if suicide has stolen their capacity to laugh, it has honed their sense of absurdity. Even in the darkest undertones of what her characters think and say, Toni Graham reveals a piercingly funny cast, short on patience with themselves and the incongruous pieties of daily life in the Heartland.
If they weren't already Hope Springs outsiders, suicide has made sure of it. Failing to fit in, they try to change, if only for themselves: Holly joins an online dating service; SueAnn works on her vocabulary; Slater gets liposuction. They keep moving forward and backward and, when their paths cross outside of their regular Wednesday meetings, sometimes a little sideways.
SueAnn mourns for her son, who hanged himself. Slater is left impotent by the loss of his father, who deliberately overdosed on pills and alcohol. Holly can't let go of her boyfriend, who shot himself. But if suicide has stolen their capacity to laugh, it has honed their sense of absurdity. Even in the darkest undertones of what her characters think and say, Toni Graham reveals a piercingly funny cast, short on patience with themselves and the incongruous pieties of daily life in the Heartland.
If they weren't already Hope Springs outsiders, suicide has made sure of it. Failing to fit in, they try to change, if only for themselves: Holly joins an online dating service; SueAnn works on her vocabulary; Slater gets liposuction. They keep moving forward and backward and, when their paths cross outside of their regular Wednesday meetings, sometimes a little sideways.
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Reviews
"[A] poignant and darkly humorous look at life after loss. . . . Each character's battle with faith, family, and personal responsibility is rendered with Graham's signature sharp wit."
Publishers Weekly
"Windfall, Pa., is the estranged sister city to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. . . . After a few stories we too become fascinated with the stuck lives of Windfall. By the end, we're like Shade and his characters in the way we feel about our own hometown. We both renounce it and fall in love with it forever."
John Mort, Booklist
"These are sad, smart, and wickedly witty stories. Graham's lost souls, uneasy in their skin and in their circumstances, linked by grief, demonstrate the way the tectonic shift of a loved one's suicide sends out aftershocks for years. Get to know the members of The Suicide Club; they feel real to the core."
Kim Addonizio, author of The Palace of Illusions