This collection from Bottom Dog Press is excellent for anyone who's been looking for a good college-text to get students talking about literature and work. In these stories, students will find their fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, and even themselves. Literature about work provides a rich opportunity for discussion and learning, and this book is definetely rich in its potential. Bret Comar's story is especially breath-taking.

This collection of short stories has something to offer for *everyone*. Bonnie Jo Campbell is a brilliant writer--fresh, complex, intriguing, and unique. Each story was written with rich images, humorous and captivating characters, and realistic settings. I would recommend Bonnie Jo's work to anyone--she's taught me more about fiction writing than any instructional book could. Definitely support this author's work!!

As carefully stitched together as a patchwork quilt, with colorful squares made of quirky characters, the inhabitants of Greenland Township, Michigan, are bound by the commonality of their daily labor and innate love of their farmland. This is the heartland of America, land that has sustained generation after generation. But as much as a failing farm economy, suburbia encroaches upon this pastoral existence, and city people are willing to tolerate only so much discomfort in their newly constructed rural environment. Once sprawled across the countryside, secure from city confines, the old families are slowly replaced by pre-fab housing developments.

Q Road's three main protagonists are strikingly different people, each with particular idiosyncrasies, forming their own core family: father, child-bride, and son, love filling the solitary loneliness so long entrenched in their hearts. The spirited 17-year-old Rachel, a new bride who has married for the security of owning land, smashes through life with no guidance or socialization, save that of her own invention. George Harland, her middle-age-plus husband, is a sixth-generation farmer who knows only that his days are suddenly more bearable with Rachel sharing their backbreaking work and love-drenched nights. George cannot imagine life without Rachel.

When twelve-year-old David is drawn to the Harlands, it is for George's fatherly protection and Rachel's pure female strength, his own mother ever more distant and self-involved. On a clear day when trouble hovers in the air, David is the catalyst for catastrophe, his one breach of judgment forever changing the landscape of their future. For the three of them, life will never be the same again.

The Darwinian inevitability of nature vs. progress lurks around the perimeter of Greenland Township and Campbell skillfully portrays the hardships and realities of farming, as even the vigorous landscape becomes a vital player in the drama. Campbell's reality is hard-edged and she never shies away from its blunt and often brutal surfaces. Yet the eccentric characters of Q Road fit snugly into the environment, their own edges sharpened early by experience.

Q Road is like an Alice Hoffman novel with sharp teeth and a rapacious appetite. At the same time, the peculiar township inhabitants have many of the intransigent qualities of Carolyn Chute's Beans of Egypt, Maine. Sprinkled with quirky individuals, neighborhood malcontents and busybodies, Q Road is overflowing with the many faces of humanity, as they reach bravely toward their better selves. Luan Gaines/2003.

Campbell's book revolves around a quirky cast of characters in rural Michigan: foul-mouthed, child-bride Rachel, her husband George, and her best friend, asthmatic, 12-year-old David, to name a few. The story itself is not particularly remarkable, but Campbell's writing makes you want to not miss a moment.

Rifle-toting Rachel, abandoned by her distant, fur-trapping mother, marries the much older George Harland, a down-on-his-luck farmer, because she wants his land. She grows to love him in her own weird, tacit way. She also loves David, who becomes even more devoted to the mysterious Rachel after his near-death experience in a burning barn. There are some more neighborhood characters thrown into the mix, but you get to know these three the best. There wasn't so much in the way of a plot, it was really just a simple story, beautifully written, about loving the place you live and the people who live there, about getting lost, even in familiar territory, and finding your way back with the help of family and friends.

Q Road is not for the faint of heart. Author Bonnie Jo Campbell takes you down a Michigan side-road to a rough-hewn world of brutally flawed characters. No sparkling wits, no dreamy introverts here; rather these misshapen and misfortuned people struggle through each and every day. Cantankerous and eccentric, they are driven to alienate kin and neighbors alike. Victims of violent acts of their past, broken marriages, rural recession and self-abuse, they gain pleasure from the misery of others.

Around them caterpillars are splattered under the wheels of cars, crows munch the remains of road-kill squirrels and cats devour birds, all in a landscape haunted by the death-march of the indigenous Potawatomi Indians. Out of this harsh reality, Campbell builds a story of grittiness, purpose and great humor that is suddenly jarred by a tragedy. An act of carelessness not malice, it threatens to overwhelm the community and break their spirit.

In Campbell's competent hands, there is no hysterical reaction and no desperation, just people digging deeper and accepting less. Q Road becomes a road to recovery. No giant steps, no minor miracles, just a poignant reminder that the human spirit needs just small kindnesses to prevail.

Bonnie Jo Campbell has, rightly, been described as a fresh new voice in American literature. This, her first novel, should be the launching point for a distinguished career.

This is a problematic book because it panders to a reader who wants flash, sensationalism. The idea is that characters are interesting only after they run away and join the circus or engage in lurid sex or otherwise decide not to be real people. It is true that the characters derive their appeal from being apart from the bourgeois, from occupying no niche but that of not having a niche, being hard to nail down. But we have too much of a good thing, too much of a begging for our attention. It's showy writing.

The best story is the one with the closest psychological distance, "Gorilla Girl", a story that is haunting and surprising, and most interesting before the protagonist joins the circus. While it IS profoundly true that almost all people in Michigan are either deformed or have joined the circus at least once, there's such a thing as overkill. Incidentally, why the emphasis, in the catalog listing and on the book's dust jacket, about the "lower peninsula"? No one refers to the main part of Michigan that way. One just says, "Michigan" and it is assumed one doesn't mean the upper peninsula, a tiny, nearly unpopulated part of the state, unless one specifies.

This remarkable collection of stories creates a bright and vivid universe of characters, situations, and places you won't soon forget. In her admirably straightforward and unaffected prose, Bonnie Jo Campbell introduces her readers to an evocative cast of Midwestern women both ordinary and extraordinary who--by a fantastic variety of means--are finally claiming the power they deserve. My favorite story--though it's hard to choose a favorite because every story in the book delivers--is "Circus Matinee," in which Big Joanie, a circus sno-cone vendor, confronts a terrifying situation when a tiger escapes from its cage. Big Joanie's story is one among many in this collection that you definitely don't want to miss. If you read only one collection of short stories this year, make sure this is the one!

Ms. Campbell writes with a strong voice and tells stories that feel very real. She manages to combine an interesting (often fascinating) storyline with characters which we, as readers, want to know better. Her writing is fearless; her stories and, indeed, the paragraphs within the stories, begin with an unusual strength and assurance, they call out to the reader, her writing draws us inside the world of her characters and makes us want to read on.

I can best explain this by quoting from her story, "Goriila Girl", this is the opening line; "When beer is mixed and left to ferment and bread is set out to rise, they sometimes collect wild yeasts; these foreigners drop out of the jet stream or rise up from the bowels of the planet, unwelcome particles which give the finished product a sharp flavor. I suspect this is what happened to my mother when she was pregnant with me."

Now, this is a story I want to continue reading!!

When reading these stories, one is left with the feeling that the writer has a great deal of information about the world, about people - she is obviously "an observer" and her dialogue and narration demonstrate her keen powers of observation. In her story, "The Fishing Dog", a man says to another character; "You act like a girl who was raised by wolves." He smiled. "They don't like to be in enclosed spaces."

I enjoyed this book of stories immensely and look forward to her next book and the one after that and the one after that.

It comes as no surprise to me that Ms. Campbell has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by none other than Joyce Carol Oates, for one of the stories in this collection, "The smallest Man in the World."

I believe that we will be hearing a great deal more about Ms. Bonnie Jo Campbell.