Where The Road Bottoms Out — Victoria Redel

Where the Road Bottoms Out delivers us to the scenes of a young woman's battles against the various forces that would rob her of her freedom -- the relations that define her apart from how she would define herself.

These are stories of what it means to be embedded in the multiform drama of parent and child: here a mother buries her children; there daughters watch grieving fathers and fathers scamming. Punctuated by dislocation and loss, this drama often turns on the inevitable moment that intimacy and love overlap with something that feels like violence, or at the point when a new kind of awareness is achieved as the solitary voice of one daughter dissolves into a "we" of sisters.

Redel's charged and lyrical fictions enact a movement both away from a life and toward taking possession of a life. Over mountains, from hotel to hotel, in cars, on foot, we follow her determined journey to record her adventures as a first-generation American and as a writer of English prose.

Here is a striking debut. Sixteen stories that combine an uncompromising and definitive "No!" with an astonishing tenderness.