The Believer

Reviewed by Rebecca Turnbull

 In her first novel, Skin, Kellie Wells tackles theological questions of eschatological proportions within the complicated web of What Cheer, a small town in Kansas. God peeks through the clouds with ominous and alarming force, knocking men to their knees and demanding nourishment with insatiable hunger.

The Believer 

 

Third Coast

Reviewed by Rachel Swearingen

 In Skin, Kellie Wells’ novel-in-stories, scars are sites of healing as much as they are repositories for suffering. The motifs of skin and scar appear repeatedly throughout the book, and the structure of the novel itself forms a tissue of interrelated, almost symbiotic smaller narratives.

Third Coast  

 

Diagram

Reviewed by Edmund Sandoval

 Ylem, the hypothetical matter that, according to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, was the substance from which the chemical elements were formed, has settled upon the sleepy town of What Cheer, Kansas, in Kellie Wells' novel-in-stories Skin.

The Diagram   

 

English Studies Forum

Reviewed by Beth Widmaier Capo

The “flyover” heartland of America was once known for wheat, corn, sorghum, and other wholesome agricultural products. But a recent notable export from the Midwest is the University of Nebraska Presses’ Flyover Fiction series, edited by Ron Hansen. Two recent series offerings,  Skin by Kellie Wells and Tin God by Terese Svoboda, serve up a homegrown helping of magical realism Midwestern style.

English Studies Forum  

 

 

Small Spiral Notebook
Reviewed by Pedro Ponce

The Flyover Fiction Series, published by the University of Nebraska Press, takes its name from the stereotypical view of the Midwest as an anonymous expanse between coasts. Two recently added fiction titles ably demonstrate the series' real purpose introducing readers to the Midwest as literary landmark. 

 

 

Review of Contemporary Fiction

Reviewed by Irving Malin

 

Wells gives us a series of linked stories with a prologue and epilogue. Although the setting is the small town of What Cheer, Kansas, the citizens of that town not only do the usual chores—cut the grass, watch television, search the sky for weather signs—they are also obsessed with divinity. Does skin reign?

 

 

 

Publishers Weekly

Wells extracts marvelous absurdity from a mundane landscape, the Kansas town of What Cheer, where obscure physical afflictions and deep existential questions weigh on a cast of neighborhood residents that includes a deacon in midlife crisis, a gay punk-rocker grasping for self-worth and a little girl with powers of divination. The shifting narratives and humor-tinged misadventures create a series of vignettes rather than a classic story arc; Wells's gift is language play. "I decline to be ground by your simplifying pestle into an easily digested set of sitcom characteristics you can swallow down without effort," says an emotionally wounded elderly woman, Charlotte McCorkle, summing up Wells's challenge to the reader throughout the book. Wells (the collection Compression Scars) often indulges her writerly flourishes to the point of alienation: "Zero's body throbbed, mortised to the superlunary, empyreal purlieu of being." But she rewards effort with a fantastical story that sweetens its bite with tabloid fare: an alien abduction, angel visitations and talking cows who try to explain God.

(Mar.)  Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Booklist
The residents of What Cheer, Kansas, are a fractured and tortured lot, wrangling with questions of personal responsibility, spiritual absolution, and cosmic uncertainty. What cheer, indeed? There's Ivy Engle, contemplating her mysterious tree filled with bats, and her boyfriend, Duncan, dressing all in blue to hide the scars ambushing his body. Next door lives evangelical Ansel Dorsett, whose piety is too much for the infirm Charlotte McCorkle to bear, laboring as she does under the delusion that she killed her husband, while in reality, he languishes in a nursing home across town. Ansel's savior may be the precocious child, Ruby Tuesday Loomis, who sees possibility in words written on cows, and dreams of fruit springing from her body, though such otherworldly skills confound Ruby's mother, Rachel, who still bears the childhood scars wrought upon her by her father's violence. In this surrealistic phantasmagoria, Wells writes with an intoxicating lyricism of the magic and mystery that lurk within and without the frailest and finest among us.

Carol Haggas  Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Kirkus

An ambitious debut sets magical realism loose upon the staid citizens of What Cheer, Kan.

Fifteen-year-old Ivy Engel has a lot on her mind. A colony of bats has set up residence in her backyard; her best friend Duncan survived a moped accident only to learn that the resulting scars may kill him; and Ivy's been having vivid dreams of planets and eyeballs. Meanwhile, senior citizen Charlotte McCorkle resists taking her medication, has a vision of sorts on her driveway and confides to her hairdresser that her nephew, Gabriel, is an angel—not such a big deal, since angel sightings are a common occurrence in What Cheer. On the earthly plane, Rachel Loomis struggles to come to terms with her father's abuse and her mother's passive complicity. The mundane and the fantastical exist side by side in this small Kansas town without raising eyebrows. Rachel's daughter, Ruby Tuesday, appears to be an oracle of sorts, and her ability has strange side effects: A neighbor sees a lemon "bubble up from her abdomen and burst forth from her churning jacket in a startling fruit birth." When Martin LeFavor and his father encounter an alien spacecraft on their way home from the mall, the aliens take Martin's father, as they desperately need his skin. Cows offer wisdom to those needing guidance. "I'll tell you something I've learned from my transmigrational travails," says one bovine. "The Book of Life has many a misprint, and in the translation back into flesh, something is always lost." The chapters, many of which previously appeared in literary journals, are highly detailed and exquisitely written. But they don't cohere into a unified whole: Characters meet and interact without propelling the story forward; the narrative remains fragmented and unfocused.

Doesn't quite work, but Wells's talent suggests that she's one to watch.

 

 

Reviews of Compression Scars