Bruce Machart warns you in the first paragraph of the first story: the dog dies. Ten pages later, you know how; you also suspect that this slim collection of 10 short stories will present more grief, more humanity, more gasps of shock and understanding than you'd expect from only Machart's second book (after the novel The Wake of Forgiveness). And you'd be right.
These men--and boys--are in the making, while debarking logs in an Arkansas mill, mourning the loss of a stillborn daughter, grappling with a hate crime that's turned a small East Texas town into a symbol of racial violence or cradling a two-week old whose mother was killed in a parking lot robbery. Their hardscrabble lives don't preclude passion, tenderness and stamina for doing what's right, not just what needs to be done. "Six months back, after Tricky's first couple chemo sessions," Machart writes in one story, "all the boys of the pipe fitters' local shaved their heads. It was a hard man's breed of brotherhood... and when he saw them his eyes filled with a liquid look of something like love."
His men may be "rough-hewn and heavy" but they "aren't afraid to keep something tender beneath their rib cages, and to expose it to the elements when the occasion calls for it, no matter how it hurts." Men in the Making presents tightly written characters and images that remind readers why short stories are often literary gems. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller