A pleasant slice of To Kill A Mockingbird. It does a great job with the narrator Eileen, a woman in her late 20s slowly realizing that she’s outgrowing the wild group she identifies with. She’s kept nicely balanced on the edge of understanding her own motives, problems, and best course, while never fully putting it into words, which helps maintain the tension about what she’ll do next. Her first-person voice is very good.

This story does something I always enjoy, which is to present a conversation in simple terms with minimal stage direction, while still doing just enough to let the reader realize that what could be a superficial chat is actually tense or hostile.

Another thing I appreciated was that the physical stakes stay low and thus more realistic. Eileen’s husband Charlie, who sucks, never assaults her. The neighbors don’t murder Robin and Nelle because of their unwelcome mixed-race business partnership, they just harass them with a lawsuit and set a fire. There’s real hostility, but most people aren’t cold-blooded murderers. The story, or the context of American fiction in this mode, telegraphs something dramatic and gruesome as soon as it lays out its premise, and it would have made the story less real had that happened.