Battleborn stories7/5/2023 ![]() Most of the book's lead characters are similarly troubled women: an anxious new mother, a woman drunkenly taken advantage of in Las Vegas, a prostitute at a brothel, a daughter reckoning with her mother's recent suicide. "I know I ought to try, ought to carry that weight, ought to paint over the past," she thinks, reflecting on her constraint. It's quickly clear why she's fumbling: Her father was part of Charles Manson's tribe, and she routinely shakes off film producers requesting scraps of family lore. ![]() Its narrator is a young Reno woman struggling to articulate her family history. The opening "Ghosts, Cowboys" exemplifies this grudge match between then and now. They're not simply "scarred" by history they're irradiated by it, queasily lit from within. Nearly all the stories are set in the present, but her characters constantly live with aftereffects of the past. What distinguishes Watkins' work more than place, though, is her command of time. ![]() The 10 stories in Claire Vaye Watkins' debut collection, "Battleborn," are set in Nevada and California, and in her hands all that dry air and open space seem designed to provoke bad behavior. ![]()
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