I don’t like to throw the word beautiful around all Willy-nilly. But Hitchcock’s writing is beautiful. It’s simple, fresh yet warm and cozy at the same time, and just stunning. It’s bright even though the subjects are heavy. She’s a master of imagery. Her writing flows, her descriptions just envelope your brain. This book gives me literal chills. My heart skips a beat. It’s a masterpiece.

I find that when I read short story collections, I’m always left wanting more from the characters and stories. Overall, the stories were good. I really appreciated how the author used small towns to show that bad things can happen anywhere. I really enjoyed how each story connected with the one that followed and that previous characters were mentioned or seen in the following story. I found it interesting that though it’s set in the past, 1995, some minor characters had progressive thoughts for that time period and are topics still dealt with today e.g., animal testing, veganism, and one-time plastic consumption. The author doesn’t focus on one theme but had serval themes that flowed together. She presents difficult topics and does it with the dignity they deserve. For me, the wanting more aspect just brought it down; to which I do not blame the author. The writing is done so well, she had me wanting more. Ultimately, if you are one that loves short stories, I would say that this book is for you.

I received an electronic ARC from Random House Children's through NetGalley.
Powerful short stories that capture various teens' realities. The stories are loosely connected via character crossover and tell an overall story about how much damage can be done by one person's actions. No spoilers in this review but this book will make readers think and will lead to discussions about how interconnected we are.
This is a swift read with serious undertones. It can be read in one sitting (as I did) or stretched out one story at a time. Hitchcock's style lets readers draw their own conclusions for several of the characters and lets them create their own endings to the stories.
There are mild triggers - sexual abuse, drug abuse in a couple of the stories.

A set of cleverly interlinking stories set in the western U.S. - claustrophobic mountain or coastal towns, a summer camp, snowy Alaska. Different characters interact in a setting that is repeated from a previous story, siblings or friends of earlier main characters emerge to take center stage as the book progresses. Themes repeat in different contexts: what are the elements of friendship? Who is worthy of trust? What is our relationship to the natural world? A good choice for book clubs or teaching about author’s craft.

I loved this book so much. I think this is the fastest I’ve read a book all year. I love how all the stories were interwoven seamlessly. The author captured the feel of a small town. It felt like the town I grew up in. Definitely recommend

This is a (mostly) delightful collection of short stories with some threads (e.g. places and people) that connect them together. It is always amazing to play the 6 degrees of separation game to see how we are more connected than we might realize.

A very easy read for me (a Sunday afternoon into evening) with so many issues touched upon in the pages.

Note: This is written for middle to high school students. And the issues the characters face are ones that many tweens and teens also face. Although, I would like to believe that large numbers of them are not being assaulted by a priest. Since the book is set in 1995, I am assuming the author is drawing from things happening then (including shuffling said priest to different locations rather than addressing the issue. Thankfully, most dioceses seem to be quicker to act when anything suspicious occurs.

The author does nod to the fact it isn't just Catholic priests who abuse or hurt children as she has another non-religious character implicated in evil actions.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the digital advance reader copy.

An interestingly styled set of interconnected short stories centered around characters who live in small towns - not as darkly mystical as Marcus Sedgwick Midwinterblood nor as simple and community oriented as Paul Fleishman's Seedfolks, but nicely done in its own right. Hitchcock manages to balance telling each story within its own section, introducing new and completely sketched characters each time, while also showing them as part of a related universe. Oftentimes story collections have weak points, chapters which are not as interesting as others or can't live up to a particularly good entry, but I felt that the offerings here were consistent throughout. There were certainly instances where I wished one story would go on longer, but it's up to you whether that's a sign of a flaw or incompleteness in the short story format, or an indication that they're so well done as to entice the reader for more. I'd also be interested in hearing from the author why she chose to set the stories in 1995 - it didn't feel out of place, but didn't necessarily feel crucial to the book either.

It's not exactly a typical YA read, but certain readers will truly enjoy.

Thank you, NetGalley, for this ARC in exchange for review.

Oh, how I loved the stories in this book. A six-degrees of separation from Montana to Colorado to Alaska. Now that I'm finished, I want to read it again knowing what I know. What I really need is a family/friend tree at the end of the book.

The multitude of characters believable, I mourned those lost with those remaining. The pain of being a teenager is real and the relationships represented could happen anywhere, but it's more intimate in a small town. Everyone knows everyone and your business is everyone else's.

Recommend for grades 8 and up.

**Thank you to Netgalley and Random House Children's/Wendy Lamb Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review. This in no way changed my rating**

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is a series of connecting short stories about small town kids living in Alaska and Colorado, primarily. Over the course of nine chapters, Hitchcock explores themes of found family, loss, abuse, neglect, growth, and the restlessness that can come with living in a small town. The book is short and a quick read, but definitely packs a punch in terms of the concepts it explores.

Of the chapters, I think my favorite one was Sea-Shaken Houses and Parking-Lot Flowers, which were connected by a character who doesn't have dialogue on the page. Sea-Shaken Houses describes when you know it's time to move on or when you know you've outgrown a place and Parking-Lot Flowers discusses the theme of going after love, even when it's difficult (the character is LGBTQ+ in a very small town in CO. I'm not speaking on the representation being good or bad because I"m not part of the community, but I did enjoy this chapter).

My least favorite chapter was originally going to be Pigeon Creek because a female character blames another female character for her boyfriend cheating on her. While I personally wouldn't go after someone else's significant other, the person who owed her faithfulness is the boyfriend and the recognition of this was too little too late for me. However, Then I read Alaska Was Wasted on Us and that is what eventually lead me to take a star off of my rating.

Alaska Was Wasted on Us is about two girls who are camp counselors. one of whom comes from a home where she was neglected by alcoholic parents. As a result, she seems to jump to conclusions about people's motives, even without evidence, and ends up costing the girls their initial job at the mall, leading them to be counselors instead. This one also has that "I was jealous you were with my boyfriend" trope, even though it's a misunderstanding. But the main reason I was upset here is that the protagonist comes across a child she doesn't know, has ONE conversation with her, and without evidence, goes to the camp director and accuses the child's male camp counselor of abuse towards the child. This is a very dangerous narrative. The girl doesn't have any evidence against this guy. If her allegations were true, the director was going to "make him aware of what he's being accused of", which could have lead to him being more sneaky with his abuse. However, the accusations turn out to be false and he's someone the child knows from home. The child's mother asked for her to be put under his care because he's a calming presence and she's undergone trauma from losing a friend at a young age. Had she been taken seriously, this could have ruined that counselor's life. The fact that accusations about child abuse at a camp WEREN'T taken seriously is also a problem, so there's that. All of this is treated like "oh, thank god I made a mistake!" and there's no real resolution. As a result, I personally find the narrative in that chapter to be incredibly dangerous to the #MeToo movement. She didn't know the situation. It didn't involve her. And false reports like this make it more difficult for actual victims to speak out and be believed. There actually IS a chapter where a child is abused, speaks out, and isn't believed, which makes this even worse. So that said, I think this chapter could have been reworked or not included.

That chapter aside, the rest of the book was well done. It talked about difficult topics, usually with the gravitas they deserved. The chapters were well intertwined with each other. And I was able to read it very quickly. I finished in a few hours, which is abnormal for me. However, because of Alaska Was Wasted On Us, I'm lowering my score to a 3.5, rounded to a 4 for Goodreads.

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5 stars

This was my most unexpected gems of 2021. I usually am so-so about short stories but I adored this compilation of short stories. My issue with short stories is often they just feel incomplete or not enough was said for me to feel engaged.

In “Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town” the Ronnie-Sue Hitchcock goes for the jugular with some heavy swinging stories that moved me in such a short amount of time. I feel she really goes to heart of experiences that many people will relate too.

In the end I feel it showed that everyone has a story, a past, a painful experience. It molds and shapes who you are. One of the most powerful things writing can do is when it makes the reader feel known and understood. I think most readers will find themselves or a loved one they have known in these stories. I would highly recommend. Thank you @netgalley for the ARC!

I enjoyed Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town. I always appreciate seeing YA short story collections, a genre that I wish had more choices. These stories reminded me a bit of Sarah Dessen's writing--the anger or fear or love or angst of the main characters at the forefront, and the setting playing as much of a role in the story as the characters. I think the YA audience will identify with these stories and really enjoy them. I'm not the target audience so they weren't my favorite, but I think this is a really strong collection, and it was a quick and enjoyable read for me. I would certainly recommend it.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House Children's for an advance reader's copy.

These seemingly random short stories and the young adults they involve have more in common than where the people are from. Everyone has a hidden part of their life their friends and family don’t get to see. Hitchcock has given us a glimpse into those very touching stories and the life-changing ways in which we’re all connected.

Some of these characters are going through some very real issues, things that Hitchcock did not shy away from showing us. I appreciate she didn’t hold back, and how through each person’s story, you could see exactly how life is in a small town. I enjoyed how it all came together through common threads. Thank you, Random House Children’s, for sending this along.

Thanks to NetGalley and Wendy Lamb Books for this ARC!

I usually enjoy short story anthologies, and to a certain extent, I also liked this one. I definitely connected to some stories more than others, and I liked that they were interwoven.

Some stories left me wanting more, or just completely flat, through no fault of the author. It was more that their stories weren't something I was interested in, or didn't connect with.

It's important to know before you read this that there are a lot of triggers to be careful of, including pedophilia, and abuse.

This book wasn't quite what I was expecting. I was intrigued because I don't think I've ever seen a short story collection by a single author in YA before. But I just didn't connect with it as much as I normally do with novels. Some stories held my interest more than others, and I did appreciate the little ways in which all of the stories were connected with characters appearing or just being mentioned in more than one. Ultimately, though, I found myself wanting to skim through the book. This just wasn't for me.

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock is a collection of interweaving short stories set across small towns in Colorado, Utah, and of course Alaska. The stories all come together, whether they are brought together by the spread of wildfire, by the abusive priest who's moved from state to state or by the hunt for a missing child.

Unfortunately I didn't love this book as much as I enjoyed Hitchcock's previous novel, The Smell of Other People's Houses. Like many short story collections there were some stories that stood out more than others. My two favorite stories were The Right Kind of People and There's Gas in the Tank, Louise! Overall, this was a heartbreaking collection but am happy to have read.

I received this book free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The author’s versatility with how each of the story were told was absolutely fantastic. Like any anthology, though, not all stories caught my attention but they are definitely interesting in their own special way.

“He slid down the wall of the phone booth and looked at the forgotten bits of people’s lives lying on the ground near his feet. Cigarette butts, a syringe, the stub of a bus ticket to Boise. A piece of blue chewing gum with teeth marks still in it. The rusty hinges of the phone booth kept the door from closing all the way, and just outside, in the pavement, one single purplish-blue flower was growing straight out of the cement. A pansy or a petunia or something else, he wasn’t sure. Conrad was the one who knew the names of the flowers, not Ben.

“‘You shouldn’t be here,” he said out loud to the little parking-lot flower. “You’re too beautiful for any of this.’”


Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock is a collection of interconnected short stories about the lives of young people growing up in small towns. While it may seem like nothing eventful ever happens in places like this, each young person has secrets bigger than the places that they grew up in as well as aspirations that bleed over county lines.

Having no experience with Hitchcock’s other work, I went into reading this collection with no tangible expectations. I really enjoyed Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town, devouring it almost entirely on a Sunday. This book is one that I could see myself reading again, especially to better. I enjoyed Hitchcock’s framing in each piece as well as the way that she handled the real-world issues that young people face daily. There is something here for every reader, and while this collection is considered YA, I think that it has a more universal appeal. One of my favorite things about this collection was being able to piece together how characters knew each other. The relationship between each of the stories helped round out the collection and created a nice cohesiveness.

It is difficult to write a synopsis of this work because of the variety of the pieces. I am still thinking about “The Right Kind of People”, “Parking-Lot Flowers”, which I pulled the quote from above, and “Alaska Was Wasted on Us”. Every short story was purposeful and each word needed. I am looking forward to reading more of Hitchcock’s work as well as snagging a copy of the physical book when it is published for my high school English classroom.

Hitchcock captures the realness of small-town life and makes us step back and consider how much we really knew about the people that we grew up with, our friends, and the peers we sat next to in school. I appreciated the commentary on the beauty of the ordinary as well.


[CW: trauma, sexual abuse, pedophilia, child death, murder, grief, drug use, car crash, wildfire, cheating.]

Thank you NetGalley and Wendy Lamb Books for this eARC in exchange for an honest review!

This book sits with you for a while. Here’s why: each story is unique, yet connected. Personally, I found the loosely connected story intriguing. At first, I wondered what the main event was, but in reality it’s a series of events that move the story along. I wanted to keep reading to know what piece of the puzzle was going to fall into place next. I was also invested, at the beginning of each story, in trying to figure out how that character was connected to a previous character/where their stories aligned (and if they both aligned with another character in the book).

Here’s what I think could’ve been better: I needed way more story and background. I understand that it was a series of short stories connecting people across states, showing different timelines and how their actions/certain events influenced others, but, boy, do I want more. I would start to really invest in the characters and then their part of the story was over. But what about the aftermath? Each character story could make up an entire book!

As I write this, I realize that I enjoyed the story a lot more than I originally thought. It is very cleverly planned out. It makes me think about my actions and how they affect others. It also makes me think about all of the lives that have touched mine and how many I’ve touched. What this author did was take a bunch of seemingly random people and stories and make them beautiful. She gives meaning and purpose to things that seem small in the moment, but are actually large and influential. She connects people and places that don’t seem to have any real connection at all. With that being said, I’m very impressed.

I do suggest reading the book in one sitting if possible. Or in large chunks. It’s a lot easier to remember how the characters are connected that way.

If you don’t know how you feel about this book, let it sit with you for a day. Really think about how the stories connected and how it relates to us in our lives.

I’d recommend this book to those who love a good YA contemporary that makes them think deeply about their lives (think Gayle Forman). If you’re looking for a cute, quick read, this isn’t it. This one is a “make-you-stare-up-at-the-stars-and-wonder-about-life” kind of read.

I will post my review to Goodreads, Instagram, and Twitter on 04/20/2021, the publication day, so check back then!. (PS- I’ve already posted a picture of it showing that I’m reading it.)

While this book certainly has some troubling and potentially triggering topics, it was wonderfully written and enjoyable. I throughly enjoyed the others storytelling style and would be interested in reading more of her work in the future!

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a captivating read.

Following our characters in their lives in small towns this is a book of hurt and loss and childhood dreams. Hitchcock captures the naivety of youth along with how easily it is crushed. We also see the struggles of friendship and growing up.

It's a fairly short read that takes us on a journey. It's a thought provoking read about relationships and the path to adulthood.