Blog tour: Wasteland Girls by Anna Bailey

This post is part of a blog tour organised by Random Things Blog Tours. I received a free copy of the book in return for an honest review.

‘Inspired by the author’s experience living amid the beautiful but often ferocious remote landscapes of the US, and among the wild and secretive outcasts who inhabit them, Wasteland Girls is a collection of incisive and luminous stories by the Sunday Times bestselling author of Tall Bones and Our Last Wild Days. These stories explore the American heartlands, a place where lives are lived on the margins, but also where there is dignity, hope, revenge and restitution.’

Wasteland Girls, by Anna Bailey, comprises ten short stories ranging from seven to 65 pages, set in places in North America characterised by extreme weather and wide, lonely expanses, across a range of time periods. The characters span demographics, but all of them have survived/are surviving considerable adversity of one kind or another, albeit not unaltered or unhaunted.

The stories in Wasteland Girls absolutely captivated me! Bailey’s writing is simply brilliant: they describe towns and landscapes so vividly and completely, it’s hard to believe they’re not actually from America; their characters are commonly their own worst enemies, psychologically adrift, and riddled with flaws, yet I felt compelled to stick with them and see how their stories played out; and they craft ingenious one-liners and turns of phrase that stopped me in my tracks as I was reading.

This collection also showcases the particular skills required to write good short stories. I could easily imagine ways every single one of them might be expanded into a book in its own right, yet Bailey has the self-discipline to include only the backstory details that are directly relevant to the characters’ current situation. Furthermore, for all I would have loved to spend more time with, and find out more about some of the characters, each story does feel complete in itself.

The short story format lends itself especially well to the element of surprise, and Bailey often takes advantage of this, whether the surprise is a sudden act of violence, an unlikely but satisfying turn of events, or a change in my feelings towards a character in the light of new information. Along with the rich descriptions and interesting characters, this kept me highly engaged with, and invested in each story.

Relationships are a major theme across the board, whether they’re between parents and children (encompassing the non-existent, disrupted, quietly adversarial and outright violent), siblings (positive or negative, but never uncomplicated), or romantic partners (including loveless/habitual, disrupted, and nascent pairings). While many of the main characters are physically and/or psychologically alone, and it’s often their previous interactions with people who were supposed to love them that have put them in this position, there’s also potential – sometimes realised within the story – to make new connections and heal.

As with any collection, I had my personal favourites, and in this case, the three stories with spooky/supernatural elements particularly captured my imagination. In the titular story, three teenage girls live with their tough grandmother, who gives off witchy vibes with her unusual, storied cane, collection of animal bones and trinkets, and talk of magic – though brute force also has its uses.

In The Girl in the Ground, a pair of characters – a woman who’s recently re-emerged from a cave she disappeared into as a teenager 19 years previously, and a social worker whose parents abandoned him as a child – confuse and frustrate one another by talking at cross-purposes and insisting on incompatible versions of events, the eerie reason for which eventually becomes clear.

In Jack the Devil – the final and longest story – the eponymous character has been 25 years old since the American Civil War (think How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, but rather less wholesome and with a lot more, er, bite). He’d already had a rough ride before he became immortal, and has a reputation locally for being fearsome and violent that isn’t without justification. However, when he builds a relationship with young widower Ellis, we see another side of him: funny, tender, and philosophical. I’d happily read a whole novel about Jack’s long life!

Wasteland Girls is a vivid, engaging, and often surprising short story collection.