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Moon Trees and Other Orphans
Winner of the 2018 St. Lawrence Book Award
"The women in Leigh Camacho Rourk’s stories carry guns and they know how to use them. This is the best kind of fiction, well-honed, lean and flinty with deep pockets of compassion and vulnerability and hope, every sentence a made thing. If you love Lucia Berlin and Dorothy Allison, (or even if you don’t) these women will get under your skin and stay there. Moon Trees is a truly stunning literary debut."
--Pam Houston
"Leigh Camacho Rourks’ fiction sits on the fault-line of reality and lore: fever-dreams that will reveal a place you thought you knew but didn’t. Moon Trees is more than just a story collection. It’s a guidebook of folktales and food and language. It’s an invitation to the customs of a region. Accept the invitation. You won’t be sorry."
-- John McNally
"Hot damn, this is a powerhouse debut. Leigh Camacho Rourks deserves a hallowed space on the shelf between Flannery O'Connor and Donald Ray Pollock. Every sentence burns like a black candle, and her stories are gothic and fearless and unsparing and barbed with wondrous detail and populated by the kinds of misfits and renegades and freaks you might feel nervous living next door to, but can't get enough of on the page."
-- Benjamin Percy
"The women in Leigh Camacho Rourk’s stories carry guns and they know how to use them. This is the best kind of fiction, well-honed, lean and flinty with deep pockets of compassion and vulnerability and hope, every sentence a made thing. If you love Lucia Berlin and Dorothy Allison, (or even if you don’t) these women will get under your skin and stay there. Moon Trees is a truly stunning literary debut."
--Pam Houston
"Leigh Camacho Rourks’ fiction sits on the fault-line of reality and lore: fever-dreams that will reveal a place you thought you knew but didn’t. Moon Trees is more than just a story collection. It’s a guidebook of folktales and food and language. It’s an invitation to the customs of a region. Accept the invitation. You won’t be sorry."
-- John McNally
"Hot damn, this is a powerhouse debut. Leigh Camacho Rourks deserves a hallowed space on the shelf between Flannery O'Connor and Donald Ray Pollock. Every sentence burns like a black candle, and her stories are gothic and fearless and unsparing and barbed with wondrous detail and populated by the kinds of misfits and renegades and freaks you might feel nervous living next door to, but can't get enough of on the page."
-- Benjamin Percy
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
162 pages, Paperback
First published October 31, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 29, 2019
These are some really nice stories. Gripping, just a little twisted, and tightly written. Love the worlds and the people in them. Good stuff.
June 7, 2020
The cover is a great representation of this collection of 15 stories rooted deep in the back roads and bayous, and multiethnic culture, of rural Louisiana. If there's a theme that runs through most of the pieces, it's of people struggling to overcome the neglectful or broken legacies of their parents, usually single ones. The prose is terse and powerful, some of the best short story writing I've read in a long time. Rourks packs a lot of story, a lot of character, and a lot of feeling into these narratives, as though each were a condensed novel. If you enjoy masterful writing that seeps into you, you'll be richly rewarded by this book.
September 9, 2020
This little book of short stories is packed with colorful characters, many of whose lives are sadly on the wrong track. Set in the deep South, the bayou country of Louisiana, most of the stories focus on young adults who have been abandoned by one or both parents and are struggling to cope.
The opening story, "Moon Trees," is quite powerful. A young brother and sister, living with their spinning out of control schizophrenic mother, grapple with having no real family and, worse, no sense of their place in the world. Other stories revolve around people who are feeling lost and injured by life but see no way out. School dropouts, girls determined to attract the wrong men, hard drinkers, and other sorts of bereft individuals who are going nowhere fast.
The writing in these stories is solid. Vivid settings, complete with alligators, snakes, and rare birds, offer nice images. And compelling characters keep the stories alive, up to a point. The middle of the book sagged for me, as the low-life characters became tedious. Honestly, I guess I just lost patience with them.
But my favorite story was the penultimate, "Everything Shining," in which a man called Teenie allows his dirtbag cousin to take advantage of him, destroying his backyard with piles of stolen copper tubing and wire. One day tragedy strikes, and the only comfort left Teenie is his ragged tomcat Holden.
The author has sincere compassion for her characters, and while none of them finds redemption, and none of the stories ends on a hopeful note, they are intriguing to read. Hopefully Rourks has more work underway.
The opening story, "Moon Trees," is quite powerful. A young brother and sister, living with their spinning out of control schizophrenic mother, grapple with having no real family and, worse, no sense of their place in the world. Other stories revolve around people who are feeling lost and injured by life but see no way out. School dropouts, girls determined to attract the wrong men, hard drinkers, and other sorts of bereft individuals who are going nowhere fast.
The writing in these stories is solid. Vivid settings, complete with alligators, snakes, and rare birds, offer nice images. And compelling characters keep the stories alive, up to a point. The middle of the book sagged for me, as the low-life characters became tedious. Honestly, I guess I just lost patience with them.
But my favorite story was the penultimate, "Everything Shining," in which a man called Teenie allows his dirtbag cousin to take advantage of him, destroying his backyard with piles of stolen copper tubing and wire. One day tragedy strikes, and the only comfort left Teenie is his ragged tomcat Holden.
The author has sincere compassion for her characters, and while none of them finds redemption, and none of the stories ends on a hopeful note, they are intriguing to read. Hopefully Rourks has more work underway.
July 5, 2020
Rourks offers us characters and settings, rich and real, drenched in bayous and blood. I reveled in this world, in her intimacies of dialects and turns of phrase. Never having been, I now have an idea. What a treasure box of lives, misfits, pain, and even laughter.
November 27, 2019
Someone once called Leigh Camacho Rourks the literary great-granddaughter of Flannery O'Connor, and it's true. What better compliment could there be? Rourks isn't afraid of exploring the dark parts of our hearts. She writes about characters--like conmen and schizophrenics--who don't always make us comfortable. But she writes about them with so much humor and compassion and hard-edged beauty that we're glad to have met them. And it doesn't hurt that Rourks is a poet, something you can tell from the musical rhythms of all her sentences.
August 17, 2020
This tour de force is a must read collection. Leigh Rourks captures something special in these well-crafted pages, and you will love every flawed and oh-so-human character trapped in these pages just as they're trapped in their habits and imperfect natures. They say the devil is in the details, but this devil is full of piss and vinegar. As much as I love today's mainstream fictional worlds, so bombarded with stories about over-the-top, flashy, superheroes saving the world from epic evil, I found something so utterly refreshing and rewarding in this collection rooted in realism. The camera narrows down to the tiny nuances and beautiful shortcomings of human beings that won't be flying to the rescue any time soon. The pages are packed with energy, capturing you from the powerful, snappy beginnings to the very (bitter) ends. Each character is fascinating and resonated with me. Even the shorter stories such as "Pulpo" and "Elma" are so full of humanity in all of its dark beauty that they leave you reflecting, thinking, feeling, and longing. From Teenie to Karo to Milas to Dalia, the quick glimpses into these characters seem somehow too profound to capture in such short, crisp fiction, and yet Rourks is able to pull it off masterfully. The awful choices made by these fallible, beautiful, deformed (pun intended -- don't skip that story!) characters aren't unrealistic in any way. Quite the opposite, Rourks somehow makes me believe that they exist, that maybe some aspects of me are in them and that I could be the one wearing their shoes tomorrow. And therein lies the beauty. In telling us the stories of these wonderful characters, she tells the story of us. She holds the mirror up--not a society-sized mirror, encompassing everything wrong with the world, but a smaller one, belonging to each of us individually, the tiny, cracked powder mirror in a purse or the upstairs bathroom mirror that hasn't seen Windex in a while. The one that seemingly obscures us on the surface, but just below the grime and cracks, if you focus hard enough, reveals the blemishes and beauty of our true natures underneath. Rourks is a phenomenal writer, able to capture voice so well, and her style is pure magic, up there with some of my other favorites such as George Saunders. Don't miss this collection. I can't wait to see what she writes next!
February 12, 2020
This collection of stories is not my usual type of reading material, but this author’s use of language and imagery astonished me. She is truly a gifted writer, and knows how to evoke emotions that stay with the reader after the book is put down. Wow!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 11, 2023
beautiful collection of short stories all grounded in gothic Louisiana bayous and backwoods. each story has characters and a world so thoughtfully built out, even when our time with them is less than a couple pages.
September 10, 2024
Probably the best short story collection I've read all year. Full of compelling characters and entangling prose, there is an authenticity to these stories I often find lacking. I really can't recommend Rourk's collection enough.
November 7, 2019
Absolutely lovely book by a wonderful writer plumbing the depths of what (lack of) connection looks like.
January 18, 2020
Not a fan of short stories and some of these were pretty bad -- not even understandable. A few were OK, but there were very few happy endings. Just not my kind of read.
May 1, 2021
These short stories have such vivid characters.
October 19, 2024
I don’t think this is a bad book but for some reason it just confused me and I hardly knew any of the words 🤷♀️
December 26, 2025
This was a great book with very intriguing stories. Not all were my particular taste but it was still a great read.
January 25, 2022
This is a formidable debut short story collection. The characters and voices reach deep into their settings. The carefully crafted language is fluid and the stories surprising. I could call these stories the best of grit lit, but they are so much more. This is a writer to watch!
May 23, 2023
What a brutal and fantastic collection of short stories, one of the best I've read in a long while. Leigh Camacho Rourkes writes with rawness and beauty about poor Louisiana, and all the lying, cheating and killing that comes with it. These are stories that stick in the mind long after you're finished, not only because of Rourke's poetic prose, but also her knack for unexpected plot twists, her tendency to make readers think it's all heading one direction only to blindside them with an unexpected course change. Rourke makes it all seem so effortless, though it's clear she's labored over each and every one of these stories. I can't wait to read more from her.
November 28, 2020
With stories that alternate between a gut-punch and a bluesy wail, Leigh Camacho Rourks debut collection is a book of memorable stories that depicts the bayou life with realism and poetry. A particularly compelling facet of this book is how it shows more of South's diversity than many books of Southern Literature--exploring the relationships of people from multiple generations and backgrounds. If you like wild fiction, here's a good call for you. If you like hearing an author read from and talk about a good book, come and check out Camacho Rourks' Booktails podcast feature and sit a spell. https://www.hotredheadmedia.com/bookt...
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews