It Falls Gently All Around and Other Stories

Reeves brings poetry to the portrayal of those who have it hard.

The stories in this linked collection explore memorable characters in Mobile, Alabama. They deconstruct what the American Dream means and while the stories build off one another, they are masterfully crafted to stand alone.

It Falls Gently All Around is a fine and noteworthy collection of characters and their stories, impeccably wrought to bring the reader into a place of tradition and contradiction. It’s a place you’ll want to return to, looking forward to where Ramona Reeves might take us next.

These big-hearted stories offer a kaleidoscopic vision of Mobile, Alabama, a place marked by a tangled history and no less tangled present. With insight, humor, and tenderness, Ramona Reeves renders lives as notable for their frailties and bruises as they are for their grace and grit. Like the work of Sherwood Anderson or Elizabeth Strout, these linked stories take us deep inside a community, even as they plumb the solitary, fiercely particular depths of inner life.

Ramona Reeves’s collection is a marvel, a round robin of people on the slide and people who were born there, the questionable nostalgia of the Old South and the absurdities of the New. A stunning intermeshing of class, race, history, and fate among people who undervalue their own lives in favor of other impossibilities. Reeves works the line between the mundane details of life and its moments of heady insight like an Olympic gymnast, and grounds it all in a fabulously wry comic sensibility. Pure magic.

These surprising, wonderfully funny stories glow with comic energy. The eleven pieces in It Falls Gently All Around serve as chapters in a deeply satisfying portrayal of characters facing the expiration dates on their old beliefs and their newly acquired convictions. Ramona Reeves has fully brought to life a cast of flawed, breaking people with bravery and resilience to spare. The book is a triumph of wise and compassionate storytelling.

There is a moment in Ramona Reeves’s powerful debut story collection It Falls Gently All Around when a character believes ‘He could make out ghosts swimming in the darkness, like another life he might have lived. . . .’ It is one of several instances in the book when a story suddenly coalesces, and the reader is both surprised and moved, and this particular example speaks to a clear ambition of the author—to capture the elusive human moments that we all experience but for which we need an artist to genuinely see. This is a splendid book by an important new writer.