The characters in LaToya Watkins's luminous 11-story collection, Holler, Child, could easily be acquaintances of the extended Texas family who haunted her debut novel, Perish. The women here--because, again, they claim the spotlight--could be victims, but most will grab their agency, most memorably and disturbingly in protecting precious children. The titular "Holler, Child" has arguably the most onerous situation, in which a mother must decide her teenage son's fate after he whispers "She didn't say yes.... But I swear she wanted me, Momma." The confrontation reveals flashbacks to her son's brutal conception in her own teen past. In "The Mother," a woman faces media inquests about "how [her son] come to call hisself the Messiah," despite being convicted for "some kind of rape or something" of "that little girl." Will she confirm the impossible? Women with deceiving partners loom. Those who chose undeserving men against their own mothers' warnings include a young widow in "Tipping" and a once-privileged woman in "Everything's Fine." Only tragedy can untangle a teen from her baby's callous father in "Paternal." A woman reevaluates her empty-nester life in the middle of the night in "Sweat" and wakes her lying husband with a pointed gun.
Watkins's writing tends toward unembellished, but that simplicity belies profound insights: "I quit peeling parts of myself off after I realized I was the only one doing the peeling"; "I'm used to being sorry"; "His fear in that moment gave her the first delight she'd felt in a long while." Despite betrayal, violence, and loss, the decision to survive--sometimes, with a hope to someday thrive--thrums loudly throughout this profound collection. --Terry Hong, Book Dragon