In Sleepovers, debut author Ashleigh Bryant Phillips provides 24 stunning, unsparing portraits of small-town Southern life. The collection begins with a bang as "Shania" recounts a girl's childhood memories of an estranged friend after she runs into her at a grocery store. In "7-Up Cake," a young student is disillusioned with her idealized teacher Miss Katie. "Sleepovers" recounts a charged friendship between two girls broken apart by financial circumstances. Finally, in one of the collection's last and most brutal offerings, "Snowball Jr.," a battered young woman's consciousness gives way to pastoral fantasy in the last moments of her life.
In story after story, Phillips conveys the vivid complexity of a claustrophobic world and its uncategorizable inhabitants. The prose is quick-witted and jagged-edged, never failing to pack a punch. From chewed pen caps to splintered porch railings, chipped nail polish to slick sunscreen oil, Sleepovers is populated but never totally defined by its mundane and yet ungraspable details. Like her character Lorene, who spots the emotion in a moth fluttering just beyond a screen door, Phillips has an uncanny skill for seeing and capturing the details that give a moment its texture and reflect an invisible atmosphere of feeling. In her hands, these images, which before had not been visible--or had been seen so much that they were no longer noticed--are given new life. Phillips's haunting, relentless attention to detail asks readers to see such moments and the people they enchant with renewed vigor, empathy and compassion. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor