Falling Women and Other Stories

Falling Women and Other Stories
by Ellen Herbert
published by Shelfstealers
NOW ON SALE AT AMAZON

What Critics Say about Falling Women and Other Stories

Herbert threads forgiveness throughout gripping loneliness and hurt, deals from a deck of recurring characters, and really captures southeastern North Carolina…a Southern author to celebrate, with a wry wit that’s free range and delicious. Richard Peabody, Editor, Gargoyle Magazine

By turns, appealing, worrisome, full of sighs, full of cheer, these stories always remain true to life, and line for line make for easy reading about difficult matters. Alan Cheuse, author and fiction critic for NPR’s “All Things Considered”

Fiction may be made of “artful lies” as one of the characters suggests, but what these generous, accomplished stories reveal is the truth about the human heart. Kate Blackwell, author of You Won’t Remember This: Stories.

These are award-winning short stories about families in turmoil and children in peril, from a homeless mother forced to put her son in foster care to a suburban mother with a water phobia afraid of passing her fear to her son.
Braxton, North Carolina is the where in these stories, a coastal town adjacent to Camp Corregidor, a stopover for recruits on their way to Vietnam and later to Iraq. Braxton is the home front, where citizens battle alcoholism, marital breakups, and scandal. In Braxton, when a sister or father does wrong, the whole family shares the blame. Even Braxton’s babysitters are dangerous, snooping through the homes of parents who entrust their children to them, stealing secrets and sometimes husbands.

But love abounds here as well. Sisters driven apart by scandal reunite when their father remarries. The babysitter who ran off with the mayor is welcomed back into her family when she returns to Braxton pregnant. A woman on the verge of being committed to an asylum for alcoholism is pulled back from the brink by a devoted friend. The Atlantic Ocean erodes Braxton’s beaches at an alarming rate, and the riptides and undertow pose a danger to swimmers, but there’s often someone on shore watching, ready to help save someone in trouble.