Colony Collapse Press

123 pages, $14

Reviewed by Jonathan Russell Clark

Kara Weiss’s Late Lights is an unusual specimen. A book of stories so connected, they basically make up a novel. But at 123 pages, Late Lights is more like a novella in stories, a combination of two types of fiction that don’t ordinarily sell well. Or even get published, for that matter. Story collections, the popular publishing wisdom goes, only interest MFA students, while novellas, apparently, interest no one. That Weiss not only published the book but also won two Next Generation Indie Book Awards makes the rarity of her achievement all the more atypical.

Weiss’s work follows three childhood friends through five stories: Monty, a troubled delinquent trying to turn his life around after yet another spell in juvie; B.J., a girl who identifies as a boy; and Erin, the straight-laced one, who, inevitably, makes some bad choices of her own. They all grew up in Brookline, a mostly affluent neighborhood of Boston (street-parking, for instance, is forbidden on many streets, so as to keep the area beautiful and unclogged by cars). Weiss’s characters, though, are not rich. In “Kinds of Violence,” we learn of B.J.’s brothers – violent, angry boys who have all spent time in court or juvenile detention or jail. In the title story, while visiting him in juvie, Monty’s father tells him that he’s moved to Roxbury, a poor neighborhood. Only Erin appears to come from a family of means, a fact made even clearer by her choice of college: Dartmouth. Continue reading →