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Township
Set in Appalachian Ohio, Jamie Lyn Smith's debut short story collection explores a region and the rotating cast of characters who call it home. With honesty and empathy, Smith closely examines the strains that intimate family ties put on lives worn raw by collective history, prompting readers to consider whether people can truly change, and if forgiveness is possible.
268 pages, Paperback
Published January 27, 2022
2 people are currently reading
44 people want to read
About the author
Jamie Lyn Smith
2 books5 followersJamie Lyn Smith is a writer, editor, and teacher. She earned her BA in English and Theatre from Kenyon College, her Masters in Education from Fordham University, and her MFA in Creative Writing from Ohio State. Jamie Lyn is the Fiction Editor at BreakBread Magazine and a Consulting Editor for the Kenyon Review. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, The Mississippi Review, The Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, Yemassee, Bayou, and other fine literary magazines. She is currently working on Hometown, a novel about millennial crises and the rise of white nationalism in the rural Midwest, for which she received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her short story collection, Township, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press in January 2022.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 24, 2022
A great short story collection for those interested in well-executed, brutally honest prose birthed at the intersections of Appalachia and the American Midwest.
November 13, 2021
A charming, captivating, stunning, and surprising short story collection of excellent craft. Something that feels close to home, but expandable to every reader with a dose of reality that creates a breath of fresh air. This collection brings a mix of tragedy, surprise, delight and more that make it hard to stop turning pages and set it down.
April 10, 2024
Cezanne once said, "With an apple, I will astonish Paris." And he delivered--with a series of simple yet masterful still-lifes. In much the same way, Jamie Lyn Smith astonishes the reader in this collection of gorgeous short fiction based in/on the rural communities of Southeast Ohio. While some authors might have been tempted to moralize or take sides in the "city vs country" debate, Smith is content to let her characters roam freely, stumble, and fall where they may. Highest recommend.
December 17, 2021
Jamie Lyn Smith’s debut short story collection Township is composed of nine excellent narratives. These stories originally appeared in literary magazines such as The Kenyon Review, American Literary Review, The Boiler, Mississippi Review, and Sequestrum, and all take place in rural Ohio. Smith’s stories weave a portrait of the people who inhabit the area, from the young boy who grows up isolated by his family’s religious fervency to the aging social worker who cares for others because she cannot rescue her own daughter. Smith’s fictive community is fully realized—its members both demonstrate agency and find themselves facing serious consequences.
Township examines successful and failed attempts at communication as characters seek reflections of themselves in friends and neighbors and wrestle with what they find. Tess is a character who appears in the second and seventh stories. In the former, she muses on a broken relationship: "Brian once told her that people with late-stage hypothermia hallucinate warmth. Maybe that’s what she had done with him, with their life." After devoting years to her relationship with Brian, Tess struggles to conceive of herself as an individual. The connection she so prized has been proven false, and she flounders, searching for fulfillment elsewhere. Her story ends with a flash of understanding, leaving the reader to see that the author’s interest lies in exploring the aftermath of unguardedness and investigating the potential for change.
Questions of forgiveness, growth, and change tether the collection. The protagonist of “Home, Grown” notes that her partner does not understand the family jokes that “papered over real resentment.” In “The Newcomers,” the focal character Hope similarly ponders whether past wrongs can be undone. She is not especially hopeful on this particular subject, but I’ll leave it to the reader to find out how her story ends.
The township’s stakes are high from the beginning, but they are magnified with each new story. As scenes pass, Smith explores devastation and resilience. The place and the people alike prove determined, with each pushing back against perceived harm. Sometimes, central characters end up doing harm themselves, participating in cycles of hurt and betrayal. But Smith develops them with such tenderness that even those who defy societal standards of likeability engender a certain level of empathy on their quest to belong.
Township is a collection that displays the eccentricities of smalltown life. The scenes are rife with narrative beauty, the dialogue full of humor and tension. Smith doesn’t shy away from socio-political conflict, nor does she pretend that characters have not been deeply affected by the incredible digital and economic shifts of the modern times. Upon completion, readers will hold onto moments of laughter and moments of sorrow, remembering the book as a meditation on bridging the gaps, on striving.
Township examines successful and failed attempts at communication as characters seek reflections of themselves in friends and neighbors and wrestle with what they find. Tess is a character who appears in the second and seventh stories. In the former, she muses on a broken relationship: "Brian once told her that people with late-stage hypothermia hallucinate warmth. Maybe that’s what she had done with him, with their life." After devoting years to her relationship with Brian, Tess struggles to conceive of herself as an individual. The connection she so prized has been proven false, and she flounders, searching for fulfillment elsewhere. Her story ends with a flash of understanding, leaving the reader to see that the author’s interest lies in exploring the aftermath of unguardedness and investigating the potential for change.
Questions of forgiveness, growth, and change tether the collection. The protagonist of “Home, Grown” notes that her partner does not understand the family jokes that “papered over real resentment.” In “The Newcomers,” the focal character Hope similarly ponders whether past wrongs can be undone. She is not especially hopeful on this particular subject, but I’ll leave it to the reader to find out how her story ends.
The township’s stakes are high from the beginning, but they are magnified with each new story. As scenes pass, Smith explores devastation and resilience. The place and the people alike prove determined, with each pushing back against perceived harm. Sometimes, central characters end up doing harm themselves, participating in cycles of hurt and betrayal. But Smith develops them with such tenderness that even those who defy societal standards of likeability engender a certain level of empathy on their quest to belong.
Township is a collection that displays the eccentricities of smalltown life. The scenes are rife with narrative beauty, the dialogue full of humor and tension. Smith doesn’t shy away from socio-political conflict, nor does she pretend that characters have not been deeply affected by the incredible digital and economic shifts of the modern times. Upon completion, readers will hold onto moments of laughter and moments of sorrow, remembering the book as a meditation on bridging the gaps, on striving.
December 13, 2021
This masterful collection perfectly renders the transformative moments that shatter the routine of small-town life. Told with wit and grace, Jamie Lyn Smith ventures into the politically, geographically, and economically underrepresented world of rural Ohio. Her Appalachian characters attempt connection across social gulfs and confront the narratives that they tell themselves about family, class, and love. Some have a chance at redemption but are afraid of the unknown; others escape their surroundings, only to reckon with the armor that protects them from the past.
With a Carver-esque ear for informal dialogue and an astute eye for character-defining situations, her intimate, humorous, and moving stories of people coming together and pulling away stir up the desire to revisit our own place of origin and explore the potent possibility that our unique truths have yet to be fully discovered.
With a Carver-esque ear for informal dialogue and an astute eye for character-defining situations, her intimate, humorous, and moving stories of people coming together and pulling away stir up the desire to revisit our own place of origin and explore the potent possibility that our unique truths have yet to be fully discovered.
December 26, 2021
*Many thanks to the author for providing an ARC*
This collection of interconnected stories is great, filled with subtle surprises and characters who make you love them even when they don't love themselves. There are moments of melodrama, a couple of which land awkwardly, but most actually provide resolution or critical jumping-off points for the characters to grow (or not).
The Appalachian Ohio setting is practically its own character, evidenced in the title. I found myself wondering again and again if the place defines the people, or the other way around; it's a fair question when they are so tightly twisted together.
Most of the stories have an arc that is predictable, but in a satisfying way, that holds true and never easy, to the people and relationships we're vested in. No punches are pulled, but the decisions and actions that unfold always make sense, and never leave the reader wondering why.
This was an unexpected read for me, and I'm so glad for it.
This collection of interconnected stories is great, filled with subtle surprises and characters who make you love them even when they don't love themselves. There are moments of melodrama, a couple of which land awkwardly, but most actually provide resolution or critical jumping-off points for the characters to grow (or not).
The Appalachian Ohio setting is practically its own character, evidenced in the title. I found myself wondering again and again if the place defines the people, or the other way around; it's a fair question when they are so tightly twisted together.
Most of the stories have an arc that is predictable, but in a satisfying way, that holds true and never easy, to the people and relationships we're vested in. No punches are pulled, but the decisions and actions that unfold always make sense, and never leave the reader wondering why.
This was an unexpected read for me, and I'm so glad for it.
February 15, 2022
I love books that teach me something about an area and its people without it feeling like a "lesson" at all. This beautiful collection takes the reader inside the lives of characters who feel like real people--flawed, struggling, failing, AND grappling with universal questions. Where do we draw boundaries in family relationships? How do we ford the river that divides insiders from outsiders? Is redemption possible? And, if so, is it possible for everyone? Here there are no pat answers, only opportunities to view the same situation through different lenses. This collection made me laugh; it made me uncomfortable, and it made me think: all marks of a collection firing on all cylinders.
May 9, 2022
You’ll be shocked that this masterful collection of short stories is Smith’s first. It had me tearing up and laughing—sometimes within the same page. There were times the characters and their predicaments felt so real that I had to remind myself it was fiction, because I was so worried about these people and what would happen to them. I tore through this gorgeously written collection, and can’t wait to read more from this author!
January 7, 2022
I thoroughly enjoyed this literary short story collection by Jamie Lyn Smith! The characters in these 9 stories are drawn with craft and precision, and I loved ways the author wove in the Appalachian Ohio setting throughout the collection. These stories center around family, community, and forgiveness. I’m looking forward to reading a lot more from Jamie Lyn Smith!
January 16, 2024
I enjoyed the short stories. A few certainly exposed me to a lifestyle I'm not used to. Best line in the book was (responding to criticism in her way of living), ".... Get down off that cross. Someone needs the wood." Great line! Easy read. Not quite 5.0, but close.
August 24, 2022
Excellent collection of short stories about survival and family in Ohio's Appalachian country.
December 30, 2024
A strong collection of short stories set in Rural Ohio—more detailed review to come
October 3, 2024
This is a collection of linked short stories that I read recently and really enjoyed. All of these stories are set in a present day fictional township in Southwestern Ohio, a part of Ohio that is in the Appalachian region. There are 9 stories in this collection and you see characters in one story show up as supporting characters in others. There are a few themes I saw in this collection. First Smith writes about the clash between country and city norms. This rural area still follows traditional ways of societal templates such as in gender roles but when kids go off to college in Columbus or Cincinnati or see more of the world, when they return to the township, they struggle to see their hometowns in the same way. There is a bit of a struggle as locals develop types of tourism that brings people from the city to visit such as llama farms and yogi ashrams. That intersection is interesting to see laid out in these stories. Forgiveness and family are also big theme. You aren’t going to see storylines based on coal or marring of the land like you might see in other ones set in Appalachia. These stories show Appalachia Ohio.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews