Trailerpark

by Russell Banks

Interrelated stories set in the small, symbolic trailer park just off an American highway, portray individuals who are alone and who take on the attributes of specific archetypes

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, American, Novels, Audiobook

274 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Russell Banks was a member of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into twenty languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards. He has written fiction, and more recently, non-fiction, with Dreaming up America. His main works include the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. The latter two novels were each made into feature films in 1997.

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I'd never been to New Hampshire before, I'd never go after reading this. Every character has a tragic story, I felt so bad for them as I was reading this. The book opens with a story about a woman who has guinea pigs, think crazy cat lady with way way too many. My absolute favorite story was the last one about a fisherman, another crazy character but at least he's seemed to find some peace admist the madness that surrounds him.

[Andrew Stewart · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up walking home one day recently. I was relieved that it wasn’t about the hijinks of zany trailer park residents, though I had no real reason to think it would be. Pretty good slice of life stories, but probably not any that I’ll still be thinking about in ten years.

[Donna Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who but Banks would even go there? He makes his characters real and gives them credible back stories. None of the stereotypes generally dealt out to people who live in mobile homes surface here.
His respectful attitude toward every day, working class people, or in some cases, people who have slid from a position of greater prosperity, makes this book work.

Awhile back, I said Cloudsplitter was my favorite Banks novel. Now I think it may be a tie. Read them and see what you think, if you like well-developed, real characters, and can deal with (often) unhappy endings.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really a novel rather than a collection of stories about the inhabitants of a trailer park in an out-of-the-way town in New Hampshire. The first and last stories are longer than the others and concern the most eccentric characters. The first story introduces the residents, and the last story shows the characters trying to act as a unit/mob. Wonderful prose about isolation and loneliness in the midst of a crowd.

[Riya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of 13 short stories about the residents of the Granite State trailerpark. The setting is in a small town in New England in 1980's. The trailerpark is home to various eccentric residents whose vastly different lives are told are told in each short story. 11 of these stories are 10-20 pages long, while the first and last story are each about 50 pages (those two short stories just happened to be my favorite and they are the reason why I chose to give the book 4, instead of 3 stars).

There is a quote on page 260 that I feel describes the characters in this book very well:

It's true of trailerpark that the people who live there are generally alone at the center of their lives. They are widows and widowers, divorcees and bachelors and retired army officers, a black man in a white society, a black woman there too, a drug dealer, a solitary child of a broken home, a drunk, a homosexual in a heterosexual society - all of them, man and woman, adult and child, basically alone in the world.

Although most of the stories are average, the first and last one are really really good and worth reading. The first is the "Guinea Pig Lady" story and it is about a middle-aged frumpy lady named Flora Pease. Flora can be described as crazy by some people: her inappropriate style of clothing (wearing long winter coat in the summer, no shoes, etc.) and loud, boisterous singing is a deterrent in her finding friends and having a healthy social life. The park's residents stay away from her, until the realize that there is something unusual going on in her home. Flora is hoarding hundreds of guinea pigs in her trailer! At first, the hobby is merely amusing, but when her whole trailer starts getting crammed with cages and a pile of feces behind her home reaches a staggering height, people start getting worried about Flora and her sanity. No one can figure out the best way to fix Flora and rid the park of the guinea pigs at the same time.

The other story that I liked very much was "The Fisherman," which is about an elderly man named Merle Ring. Merle's favorite winter pastime is ice-fishing. This is his passion and his main activity during the brutally cold winter months. Everything is going well for Merle until he wins a large amount of money from a lottery. He decides to keep the money in a box and not spend it, preferring to fish and drink whisky instead as if nothing incredible has happened to him. His neighbors, however, have other plans. Each person can't help but imagine what that much money can do to change his/her life. The people talk about the money constantly and are soon infuriated with Merle for not spending it and/or loaning some of the money to them. The people's jealousy and avarice grows to such astronomical proportions that it culminates in a single very shameful action that nobody ever forgets again.

[Dennis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this was the second book by Russell Banks that I read. He was and continues to be on my list of favorite writers, one of the few I bother following (and one of the professors of another of my favorites, Ann Patchett.) Except for one clunker, he´s never disappointed because he has a way of getting inside ordinary people and their struggles to maintain a grip on a life that´s slipping away, inch by inch, and transmitting it to the printed page. And what better setting than a trailer park, a place where people tend to end up rather than aspire to (although not always unhappily.) This set of interrelated stories of the inhabitants of an American trailer park really moved me because it's a sort of microcosm, how one group of people in a relatively-small shared space, moving through life (or settling for what they have) can each have their own story, from tragedy to happiness and love. I don´t own the book anymore but I can say that I still remember parts from more than 30 years back, and continue to enjoy Russell Banks, although he's not on anyone's best-seller list, nor will he likely be.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have enjoyed a number of books by Russell Banks, and he writes over a fairly wide range of topics and styles. This is a book of short stories. I have a particular enjoyment of short stories. Sometimes a collection of short stories can seem quite unconnected with each other, however in this book, the short stories, all relate to people in a small Milltown in Central New Hampshire. Even more specifically, most of the stories relate to people who live in a particular trailer park.

The people are unique and desperate/disparate! The stories are almost universally interesting although it would be hard to say whether they are deep or shallow.

[Leslie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This reads like fiction based on fact. Slightly exaggerated. I should know. I live in a trailer park.

[Colin Brightwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This falls somewhere between 3.5 to 4 stars. Maybe 3.8? 3.9?

The reason it’s not entirely four stars is because I found the opening and closing longer short stories to be a little too long. They take a while to build-up, but there are some incredible moments in the linger stories - “The Guinea Pig Lady” and “The Fisherman.” The last three pages of “The Fisherman” was just so damn beautiful.

What Russell Banks accomplishes in Trailerpark is creating characters so rich and lively. Like a 3D printer for the written word, his characters really just jump out at you, and he offers us glimpses into their (depressed but not deprived) lives. These are interconnected stories. And the stories themselves are as rich as the characters that populate and seamlessly move through them, taking deep breaths with every page and paragraph. Some writers have decent characters. Russell Banks has exceptional characters.

Standout stories:

“Cleaving, and Other Needs.”
“Black Man and White Woman in Dark Green Rowboat.”
“Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan.”
“What Noni Hubner Did Not Tell the Police about Jesus.”
“Comfort.”
“The Burden.”
“The Right Way.”

[Eileen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the prose of Russell Banks. This is a series of short stories that loosely relate to one another and the characters inhabiting a trailer park. All the characters are quirky and interesting. A particularly powerful story, The Burden, describes the difficult relationship of father and son. This was my favorite. Russell Banks: he can write. He's a little on the dark side, and I like that.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audible version: This is classic Banks. I hate to use the overused word "raw," but that's just what it is. Reading Banks is like touching an open wound. It's painful to read sometimes for the reality of it. In this one, I almost couldn't listen to the screaming child one. And the one about the dad and the son? Visceral. I wasn't enamored with the Guinea Pig Lady or so much with the Fisherman, though I did love the endings of both of those. This one is worth reading, though I have to say, it did feel a bit dated as can be expected having been published in 1981.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may have been Banks’s first really good book. I read another collecion of stories of his from the 1970s that was very disappointing. But this time I am happy to express that Banks is just as capable of writing excellent short stories as he is of writing excellent novels. This is a story series that takes place in a New Hampshire trailer park. This must be the type of milieu that Banks comes from; his familiarity with it comes thru on every page. He must be a blue collar Yankee from that neck of the woods, his stories have the stolidity and resignation that mark the breed.

Two stories, which bookend the collection, focus on the park as a community and how its members respond to an unusual situation. The first one, “The Guinea Pig Lady”, is 80 pages long and introduces the characters. An odd, solitary woman has filled her trailer with rapidly breeding guinea pigs. Some of her neighbors support her, others apply pressure to get rid of the little beasts. The final story concerns another odd, solitary character (the book is full of them), an eccentric, yet wise older man who wins $25,000 in the state lottery, and then refuses to do anything with the money. The residents of the park grow more and more agitated at this flouting of sensible behavior until they decide to charge over to his ice fishing hut and grab the money.

The other stories focus on one or two of the trailer park’s residents. Most of Banks’s characters are struggling with something: loneliness, alcoholism, emotional problems, being black in a white area, homosexuality, family troubles. This trailer park, which never has a name, is a collection of fairly ordinary misfits. And although they can provide some entertainment from time to time, their struggles are not amusing. They face the difficulties of life with courage and sensitivity. But they don’t always win. In fact, they rarely do.

Allow me to introduce some of the cast. There is Marcelle Chagnon, a tough old Frenchwoman that manages the park. There is Bruce Severance, a young hippy pot dealer. There is Carol Constant, a Black woman from Massachusetts and her kicking-around younger brother, Terry. Nancy Hubner, who has left her husband, shares a trailer with her increasingly troubled 17 year-old daughter, Noni. Capt. Dewey Knox, a precise, retired military man, lives alone. Leon LaRoche, a gay bank clerk has a trailer near the captain’s. Doreen Tiede lives with her 5 year-old, after separating from her sexually ineffectual, but handsome husband, Buck. And Tom Smith is there with his son Buddy, a pathological liar.

All the stories have their good points, but here are a few favorites. “God’s Country” in which Carol Constant, a nurse, gets repeatedly hit on by an older doctor she works with. There is a nice bit of writing at the end, when Banks adds a surprise ending that changes the meaning of the story. In “Comfort” a man unintentionally confesses something personal to another man, and is not rejected for it. “Cleaving, and Other Needs” and “Principles” both effectively show the descent of young men into failed marriages and bitterness.

Long live Russell Banks. I hope that the movies continue to be made, and the books keep coming.

[Hatseflats · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though titled as "a novel", this is really more a collection of interconnected short stories. Each short story highlighting a different member of a trailer park community in rural New Hampshire in the 1970s. The range of mood contained in these stories is quite varied from absurdist and surreal to painfully sad and introspective. This was my first experience reading Russell Banks. From my first exposure to his work, I think I may be reading more of his work in the future.

[Patrice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trailerpark by Russell Banks was an interesting read. I used this for my A Lifetime of Books Challenge. The writing is good, the stories flow, and I found myself wanting to find out “what makes these people tick” too.
It is a book of short stories with a common thread running through it, namely the trailer park. Each story focuses on one of the inhabitants of the trailer park, though not every one of them has their own “story”. If you’re looking for a good book where the author makes you think about the people around you and your own personal “code” that you live by, this is an excellent book for you. Banks delves into the psyche of several of the characters and how the other trailer park folks interact with them and how they handle these interactions. Some of the stories tell you how the people ended up in New Hampshire, in a small corporate run trailer park, too.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection of short stories Russell Banks moves back and forth in time to paint the lives of the residents of a trailer park in a small town in New Hampshire. The prose is beautiful, the stories are deeply touching and understandable, and illustrate how each character is alone. "When you share the center of your life with someone else, you create a third person who is neither you nor the person you have cleaved to. No such third person resided at the Granite State Trailerpark." That sounds really depressing, but it isn't. It's reality for these people and they each learn to cope in their own ways.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Captures the desperation, both quiet and not so quiet, of poor people living in a New Hampshire trailer park in the late 1970s. A few of the characters are less than convincing, but the style is spare and heartbreaking.

All of the stories are interconnected, which lends the collection a novel-like quality, but the stories usually stand alone well. The last one was my favorite, exploring what happens to a community of poor people when one of them wins a small lottery jackpot.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5-I love some of this author's work; I like this group of interconnected short stories fairly well, but find it uneven overall. Some of the stories resonate, some do not, but the author's unique point of view is consistent throughout.

[Ed Maher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Russell Banks is primarily a sociologist who writes magnificently about social class. This book of stories was written in 1981. Today, it provides incredible insight into the mind of the Trump voter, thirty five years after its ascendance. What a treasure.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If you don't know what you've got when you've got it, you won't know what you've lost when you've lost it."


A collection of interconnected stories about the residents of a trailer park in the fictional town of Catamount, New Hampshire. The stories are not told in a linear fashion; instead, they move back and forth in time.

Average rating: 3.88/5, rounded up to 4/5. Individual ratings below.


The Guinea Pig Lady - 4/5

The longest story in this collection, focusing on the titular Guinea Pig Lady, a.k.a. Flora Pease, retired formt he Air Force and a new arrival at the trailer park. A bit eccentric, Flora soon buys some guinea pigs, raising and breeding them despite a rule in the park against pets. Eventually, the guinea pigs become something of an obsession for the woman. The story also spends some time on the other people who populate the park: Marcelle Chagnon, who was the park's first resident and now manages it; retired Army Captain Dewy Knox; Nancy Hubner and her teenage daughter, Noni; siblings Terry and Carol Constant, the park's only black residents; Doreen Tiede and her young daughter; Merle Ring, a strange man who spend his free time fishing; Bruce Severence, a college-age man who sells pot; Leon LaRoche, who works as a teller at the savings and loan.

Perhaps a bit overly long, but that's understandable seeing as the story is trying to set up the location and cast of characters that will populate the collection. A good start to the book.


Cleaving, and Other Needs - 4/5

The story of Doreen Tiede and her ill-fated marriage to her ex-husband, Buck. Their marriage was marred by Buck's alcoholism and abuse, and by her numerous extramarital affairs.

A good little story about the fate of an ill-matched pair. The story posits that there are two types of people, those who can only give love and those who can only receive it. What a pity then that these two were both of the latter type.


Black Man and White Woman in a Dark Green Rowboat - 4/5

A young man and woman go out on the lake near the trailer park in a boat. Once out, the young woman reveals that she is pregnant.

This one was written a bit strangely as the author for some reason decided not to name the character, but to just describe them and leave it up to the reader to figure out who he was talking about. From the descriptions, it's clear that the two main characters of this story are Terry and Noni.


Dis Bwoy, Him Gwon - 4/5

Bruce Severence has gotten into some trouble with a Jamaican drug gang, and he seeks help from Terry.

Here, the author shows us that he will pull no punches.


What Noni Hubner Did Not Tell the Police About Jesus - 3/5

Noni Hubner has been provided for by her mother ever since her father died. Sometime after ending her pregnancy and her relationship with Terry Constant, Noni has a mental breakdown after believing she has met Jesus.

The weakest story so far, in my opinion.


Comfort - 3/5

Leon LaRoche tells Captain Dewey Knox about an unfortunate incident with a young man named Buddy Smith, who used to live at the trailer park.

On par with the previous story. Not bad, but not very good either.


God's Country - 3.75/5

Concerning Carol Constant and the time she got a job caring for a dying man.

Pretty good.


Principles - 3.75/5

Centers on Claudel Bing, who used to live at the trailer park with his wife until their trailer burned down. The store concerns itself with Claudel's philosophy of life, on luck and the lack thereof, and the dissolution of his marriage.

Decent story.


The Burden - 4.5/5

Concerning the fractured father/son relationship between Tom Smith and his son, Buddy, who was alluded to in "Comfort". Struggling to raise Buddy as a single father, Tom has spent much of his son's life protecting him and making excuses for his bad behavior. Now, when Buddy returns to town after having disappeared months earlier with some of Tom's belongings, Tom may finally be done with Buddy.

The strongest story so far.


Politics - 4/5

Nancy Hubner finds herself changing and becoming "political" amid the changing times, and considers leaving her husband.

Another good one.


The Rght Way - 4/5

A story about Captain Dewey Knox on his fourteenth birthday. He spends a day out with his father and witnesses the man suffer a humiliation.

A good father/son story.


The Child Screams and Looks Back At You - 4/5

Concerning Marcelle Chagnon, her ill-fated marriage, and the loss of her son to illness.

Good back story of the tough lady from the opening story.


The Fisherman - 4.5/5

When Merle Ring wins $4,500 in the lottery (with a chance at winning another $50,000 grand prize), the trailer park descends into an orgy of greed and resentment.

A strong finisher for the collection.

[David Partikian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought him a second beer , and we talked about how hard it was living in a small town in New Hampshire, how boring it was and how mean-spirited the people were."
--Trailerpark page 115.


Every once in a while, clickbait articles proclaim the most famous author or book from a state in the USA.* New Hampshire has a dearth of professional writers and notable books in which the region, a very small state, serves as a backdrop. Most lists name pop author John Irving as the New Hampshire writer* and his fluffy, inconsequential Hotel New Hampshire as the book that best encapsulates the region.

Lost in any discussion is Russel Banks and his book of interlinked short stories, Trailerpark, where the characters described are so typical of the region that I feel like some of them live in my small town, Newfields, NH.** Trailerpark first appeared in 1981, and includes a small group of characters mostly living in an eponymous trailerpark in Catamount, NH with Banks focusing, in each one of the stories, on key points in their lives. Thus, the stories, or—if you will—chapters, span a couple of decades, but seem contemporary, even in 2023, as the various insulated NH natives seem to have changed little in the past couple of generations. Townies get drunk in the local bar, the Hawthorne House, where one of America’s most famous authors allegedly fell ill shortly before dying. A Hawthornean sense of doom, small town provincialism, and generational stasis runs throughout the stories which all take place with stark descriptions of harsh seasons that remain true to this day in the state despite climate change.

James Joyce’s Dubliners and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio immediately come to mind while reading Trailerpark; indeed, they are referenced on the dust jacket.*** I’d also add Richard Yates’ completely underappreciated Eleven Kinds of Loneliness to the list, although that book—in the contrast to the other two, does not have any interlinking incidents and characters. Both Joyce and Yates wrote often about the lower middle class, as does Russell Banks.

The characters in Trailerpark are immediately recognizable to anyone who has spent time in a small town. The ones who congregate in the bar would be classified as “townies,” while others are just struggling to survive both financially and with peace of mind. In fact, Banks’ characters evoke those of Raymond Carver, who was publishing his most famous short stories in the same brief era, the early 80’s--the heyday of the Modern (Post Post-Modern) American short stories—in which Russel Banks’s Trailerpark appeared and was immediately forgotten; Banks became a more noted author with later works, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction. Both made into remarkable films. As someone transplanted from the PNW to rural NH, I find Banks’ stories way more touching than Carver’s. A couple of them—quite literally—brought tears to my eyes.

Over-analyzing short stories is an exercise in futility. The stories are concise enough and poignant enough to belay the need for extended descriptions. Suffice to write that, although there are a couple of less compelling stories—for the most part—a reader could use Trailerpark to gain an appreciation and understanding of small town America even from the vantage point of today’s divided nation. All the characters are human, all too human. Always ahead of his time, Banks even emphasizes how white NH by including exactly two black characters, which—taken in historical context—says quite a bit about the small town mentality.

---------------------------------
*Joyce Maynard and Jodi Picoult also come to mind. J.D. Salinger retreated to New Hampshire, but was not born there. Nor did he have stories set there. If we include poets, Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings perhaps take the prize, with Frost having the advantage cause his poetry evokes the brutal winters and mankind’s insignificance in nature.

**I relocated to rural NH during the pandemic. Like anyone who has moved to taciturn New England, I am an outsider. It takes years to fit in, and a book like Trailerpark illustrates exactly why this is.

**The dust jacket flyleaf description is laughably bad, referring to the characters in the stories as “archetypes,” something that would have gotten the writer of the extended blurb kicked out of an English program by 1986.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's much in "Trailerpark" to admire. Banks's prose style is clear, sometimes elegant, never showy, and the premise of the book--a set of linked stories about the inhabitants of a trailer park in New Hampshire--appeals to me. He attempts to give each character his or her due, and Banks, in this book as well as others, has tackled the great American themes of race, sexual harassment, and poverty before it was fashionable to do so. However, as I continued reading the book I found my attention flagging. I'm still not sure why, but I believe it partly has to do with the amount of exposition in "Trailerpark." Stories are set up and then explained by the author, with only intermittent action in between. This gives the stories a curiously distant feel. I couldn't quite connect with the characters. And while some, such as an African-American nurse from Concord and her brother, a young hippie drug-dealer, a retired carpenter, and a lecherous doctor, stood out, other characters blurred together so that I found myself asking "Who is this person again?" Maybe this is the inevitable outcome of trying to depict such a large cast of characters in such a slim book. A few of the stories felt forced to me, or rather staged, as though the events sprung from the message Banks hoped to impart rather than from the characters. Ultimately I was unconvinced by Banks's depiction of the trailer park itself. First, it had a nice beach and abutted a picturesque lake--prime real estate where trailer parks are almost never located. Secondly, there was a permanence to the court's inhabitants and a communal vibe that in my own life I've never experienced. I've found trailer parks to be transitory places, much like apartment complexes, where people are constantly moving in and out, and the tenants generally want to be left alone. The trailer park in Banks's book might've been a convenient set-piece for illustrating the struggles of people on the lower end of the income strata, but it just wasn't overly convincing. Overall I enjoyed "Trailerpark" but would not rate it as one of Banks's stronger works.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoy everything I read by Russel Banks, Trailerpark was no exception. The book reminded me of the Sherwood Anderson Classic, Winesburg, Ohio in its structure. It was much more of a short story cycle than it was a novel. 12 Trailers in a small trailerpark on a lake in New England. Each trailer's inhabitants lives hold secrets and celebrations, and Banks does a masterful job of weaving them all together. The end is a spot on dissection of human nature and humans have such a gift of getting in their own way.

[Judy Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the 5th book I've read by Russell Banks, earning him one of the top spots on my all time favorite authors. The stories are inter-related as they depict each resident of the trailer park at some point in their lives, with the characters making appearances in most all of the stories.

Banks has a very sophisticated and esoteric style of writing, which lends to depth of the main characters. This book is not a "fast read" that you can devour quickly. The physical, emotional, social and economic setting of the area and residents comes alive through Bank's in depth descriptions.

[Sean B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Russell Banks -- "The Sweet Hereafter" was a wonderful read. However, this collection of short stories don't seem to hold together much at all. I might have had unruly expectations thinking that the stories in this collection would speak to each other and perhaps interact with each other a little more, but this did not happen. I feel like if each individual story were written by an unpublished author, none of them would see the light of day. Although the writing is often good and there's at least a few great lines in each story, this book unfortunately never felt like it was great.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've always been a sucker for interconnected stories; the subtitle "A Novel" intentionally misleads--this is a collection of short stories, and a masterful one. All about the characters--and the motivations of the characters. They're realist in style; but also darkly humorous, never tedious.

Glad to have discovered Russell Banks--a name I have heard before but never knew about. Reminds me of a [smarter] Richard Russo. If this is a minor work of his, can't wait to try his better known works.

[Jason Eaken · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolute masterpiece.

I loved getting to know and spend time with these characters.

Beautiful, simple prose, soaked in melancholy and loss, and yet not without hope. Never without hope, even when the bleakness threatens to overtake its characters, whose lives have been anything but easy and nothing if not hard.

[Bryan Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of short stories (a few bordering on novella-length) about the residents of a rural New England trailer park in the last days of the 1970s. It's clean, professional, "late century Real American Male" fiction - stories that would've absolutely KILLED at Yaddo in a summer session just after the Vietnam War ended. Think Kent Haruf with a slightly less distinct voice. Or Raymond Carver with slightly more variation in plot. Or maybe just Tim O'Brien - another Tim O'Brien.

I enjoyed the collection, but I'm almost certain that, unless I find a worn copy for 25 cents at a used book sale on a vacation where I forgot to bring something to read (I never forget to bring something to read), I don't need to read more from Banks. I get it - this is what you do. Cool.

[Irene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't say I enjoyed reading it. It's too depressing for that. But I appreciated it and I'm glad I read it. It started like a novel, the I realized the chapters were short stories with the same setting and characters in all of them.

[CATHERINE E. LOUGHLIN · Rating 3 out of 5]

A different kind of novel. Separate chapters about the various residents of a NH trailer park. They aren’t really in chronological order. The final chapter brings them all together but the ending was pretty meh

[Aliesha Hill · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the concept here but don't think it was executed well. I liked some of the stories but found others boring and I had a hard time even wanting to pick the book up. There's a feeling of sadness that runs through the entire book which isn't always my favorite either.