YOU WONT REMEMBER THIS

The twelve stories in Kate Blackwell s debut collection illuminate the lives of men and women who appear as unremarkable as your next-door-neighbor until their lives explode quietly on the page. Her wry, often darkly funny voice describes the repressed underside of a range of middle-class characters living in the South. Blackwell s focus is elemental-on marriage, birth, death, and the entanglements of love at all ages-but her gift is to shine a light on these universal situations with such lucidity, it is as if one has never seen them before. In My First Wedding, a twelve-year-old girl attends her cousin s Deep South wedding, where she discovers both mystery and disillusionment and, in the end, finds she s not immune to her family s myth of romantic love. In Heartbeatland, when a young woman s husband dies suddenly, she refuses to sell his Jeep to an importuning gay neighbor. The more she clings to the Jeep-and to the memory of her beloved David-the more he becomes someone she doesn t recognize. In Queen of the May, a former belle looks for ways to assuage her loneliness in her large new house in the empty Carolina sandhills._,