Hymnal for Dirty Girls

Rebekah Matthews debut collection snaps with poignant and sharp-edged stories, charged with desire and disquiet between women. Her characters evolve before our eyes, learning how to relate to each other in the strange confines of normalcy. In these six wonderful melancholies, we travel from a suburban Red Lobster to a Baltimore sex stakeout, from brief earthly heavens and to a very literal Hell. The characters grapple with loss, survival, and faith as they try to navigate the complicated ins and outs of the everyday world. In "Reasonably In-Shape Women", a young woman attends a fashion blogger's backyard barbecue where she witnesses an affecting act of love, in "Worse Than", a high school student learns the power of storytelling, and in "Heaven for Everyone" a cancer patient faces her own mortality. On every page, Matthews exposes our fears and illustrates our reactions to them as something very beautiful.