Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

National Book Award winner Tuck (The Double Life of Liliane, 2015, etc.) turns her attention to Emily Bront's gothic, psychologically riveting Wuthering Heights in Heathcliff Redux, the novella at the center of this collection.It's 1963 in rural Virginia, and the unnamed narrator, who's a mother and the wife of a cattle farmer, is rereading Wuthering Heights when she finds herself inexplicably drawn to a morally compromised man named Cliff. Although warned that Cliff is "too good-looking for his own good," "reckless," and untrustworthy, the narrator falls hard. The story of their affair unfolds as collage: Interspersed with passages from Wuthering Heights, snippets of Bront's biography, and critical commentary on the novel, the narrator reports in short dispassionate sections on the places she and Cliff make love, on Cliff's lies, and on her husband's affair, among other things. Places or things that arise in scenes from Wuthering Heights or the narrator's own story (Rehoboth Beach, cuckoos, Boeuf Bourguignon) are sometimes glossed on the next page, underscoring the extent to which facts are not necessarily truths. Though the narrator is looking back (much of the secondary material was published 30 years after the affair), hindsight doesn't help her understand why she allowed Cliff to become the force of so much destruction. Instead, the human heart remains a mystery, which seems to be the point. This may disappoint readers who expect fiction to explore the reasons for characters' actions or the novella to shed new light on Bront's novel (or vice versa). The final four stories are both stranger and more conventional. The characters do things surprising (like carrying a dead swan home) and shocking (murdering a teenage girl), and yet the past always catches up with the present, emphasizing the age-old beliefand plot of much fictionthat you can't escape the consequences of your actions.Lean, intriguing, formally innovative prose that will satisfy some readers while leaving others hungry for meatier plots. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

National Book Award–winner Tuck (The News from Paraguay) probes the gulf between expectations and reality as well as between outward appearances and internal disquiet in this collection of four short stories and a novella. The title novella is set in 1963, in the months leading up to the Kennedy assassination. In the horse-riding, fox-hunting milieu of Albemarle County, Va., the wealth and privilege of white residents heighten a sense of insularity and innocence that, as readers know and Tuck hints at, will soon be shattered. The unnamed narrator, a young mother of twin boys and confined to a comfortable but stifling marriage, embarks on an affair with the sexy but un-intellectual Cliff. Meanwhile, she’s rereading Wuthering Heights, and Tuck’s measured prose contrasts its matter-of-factness with the passionate overtones of Brontė’s original. The accompanying stories also showcase the author’s mastery of shorter form fiction. “Labyrinth Two” imagines the interiority of the subjects in a 1950s photograph. The remaining stories have more contemporary settings: “The Dead Swan” finds a young woman heartbreakingly optimistic about her addict boyfriend’s hopes for recovery, while “A Natural State” unfolds largely through emails. In what might be the most gut-wrenching story, “Carl Schurz Park” finds a young man, newly married and about to become a father, hiding a horrific secret from his youth. Tuck’s restrained and elegant stories deceptively carry a deep emotional heft. Agent: Georges Borchardt, Georges Borchardt, Inc. (Feb.)

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

National Book Award winner Tuck continues doing what she does best, offering ice pick-incisive studies of human relationships. In the title novella, a married woman reads Emily Brontė's classic Wuthering Heights as she becomes dangerously drawn to her own Heathcliff. The additional four stories range from suddenly remembered violence that happened long ago in a New York park to a photograph spookily limning the connections among a group of friends.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Comprised of a novella and four short stories, the acclaimed Tuck's new collection, following the novel Sisters (2017), finds various characters reconciling with the realities of their lives. The title novella is narrated by a young housewife who lives with her husband, Charlie, and twin sons on a 400-acre farm in 1960s Virginia. While she attempts to navigate the social norms of her well-off neighbors, an encounter with the handsome yet shifty Cliff evolves into an affair. When Cliff and Charlie become friends and business partners, further straining the narrator's marriage, the proliferation of secrets and lies threatens to explode. Other stories portray characters trying their best to balance present demands and past regrets. In the haunting The Dead Swan, substitute teacher Sadie is pulled into a life alone as her drug-addicted husband awaits trial. In A Natural State, Claire is unexpectedly forced to confront her long-ago self as a member of an Indian mystical movement after receiving emails from an unknown sender. Tuck reveals grace in unexpected places as she exposes the uneasy turns and harsh truths of her characters' journeys.--Leah Strauss Copyright 2020 Booklist