I thought this was great, and I wasn't sure at all what to expect from it. The way the stories connect is really creative and original, and I totally got the sense of small town life. Really good. Something to pair with Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds, maybe, although this is older.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with a DRC of this title for review. All opinions are my own.

I had read Hitchcock's earlier work (The Smell of Other People's Houses ) and enjoyed the premise, but didn't feel like I was "literary" enough to appreciate the minutiae of what she was doing. With this book, a collection of interconnected vignettes that look at sexual abuse, grief, and the weight we give to girl's voices, she knocked it out of the park. This is a book I would gladly read again, just to enjoy the cadence of the words and to redraw the lines between all of the characters. It is also a book I would be ITCHING to get my hands on to put into a HS Language Arts curriculum, because to pair these vignettes about grief with O'Brien's The Things They Carried would be incredibly powerful.

There is no way to summarize this book. Each chapter gives you a glimpse into someone's life, and then, in the next, it's as if the image has been shifted just slightly, so now a person who was merely in the background, or half cut off by the edges, is now front and center. And by the end, you've started to understand these people and the universal truths of growing up and small towns: everyone and everything is connected. And while you might "know" everyone in your small town, you eventually realize you didn't actually know them at all.

Highly recommend.

Short stories merit a writer’s finest discipline, and Bonnie Sue Hitchcock has achieved this in her poetic depiction of life in small towns – where ordinary incidents can be extraordinary in their impact. Set in Alaska, Colorado and the Pacific Northwest, these stories portray the anger of grieving teens, the disillusionment of betrayal, friendships that span time and distance, and the power of sibling love. One of the most appealing qualities of this book is the recognition of one’s own experience, whether you have lived in a small town or not. Who hasn’t persisted in an activity to please a parent, pretended to be someone different than they were, trusted the wrong adult, or fantasized about sneaking into the bedroom of a crush? Each story in this collection is compelling on its own, but the real beauty lies in the thread Hitchcock weaves between them. I found myself reflecting on earlier chapters as I gained a deeper understanding of a character’s motivation and circumstance. It was as if I was having one “Aha” experience after the next. A beautiful and heartbreaking read to which I will return again and again.

A wonderful group of interconnected short stories focused on teens dealing with trauma, loss, changing friendships, natural disasters, death, betrayal. It has everything!! I loved learning how each story connected to the next and sometimes looped back around. I also enjoyed that the stories were set in the west and Alaska. So many books for young people seem to be set on the East Coast. A nice change of scenery - literally!

I was drawn to this book the librarian in a small rural town, and since the description seemed promising I figured I would give it a whirl. Sadly I really struggled with this one. As I read it I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop so to speak, and it never did. I wanted to know more about each of the characters and about their stories. I'm not usually a reader of short stories and I guess now I know why.

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town, by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

I am an enthusiastic fan of BSH’s first book The Smell of Other People’s Houses, and was anticipating that Everyone Dies Famous would be equally insightful and engaging. Though I did enjoy reading the stories, I found it to be a bit lackluster in comparison. Though, as a short story collection, Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is a compelling read.

I cannot help but wish that there had been more character development, and I was disappointed that the book ended so soon. (These are short stories after all-- I just wanted more.) Though I did not have time to really connect with any of the characters, the challenges they each were facing were very real. The author does not shy away from exposing the small town eccentricities and secrets that often become a teenager's own personal hero's journey.

In thinking of how I could use this book: my middle school students often struggle with writing short vignette assignments-- the kind of story where you start right in the middle. EDFST would be an excellent collection to use in conjunction with overcoming the struggle. The author drops us into a scene and we ride along and slowly uncover the challenge that each protagonist is dealing with. Since there is no map or family tree connecting the characters, this would be an engaging visual to create-as a group or individually.

I don't read a lot of short stories, but the title of this book and the cover both caught my eye, and I'm so glad that I downloaded it, because this might be one of my favorite books that I've read this year.

Hitchcock excels at the sense of place in the west and pacific northwest where these stories are set. It's clear that she knows this place well. The stories start out with one set of characters, and a few stories in you begin to realize that there are connecting points between all of these stories. Each story contains at least one character - sometimes more - that is connected to events in other stories. This interconnectedness, shows the strange ways our lives can overlap with others and how we're all connected to other people.

The stories themselves deal with identity, loss, love, sexuality and other aspects of young adult life. There is a content warning for sexual abuse at the beginning of the book, and one story deals with this significantly.

Would highly recommend this book for older teens, and am grateful to the publisher for having a chance to read it.

Descriptive of the ambiance and social dynamics of small town in the western US. Intense emotions depicted of sometimes troubled characters and relationships. Some of the stories feel unfinished, as though they are ideas that haven’t been fully fleshed out.

I started reading this on my lunch break and didn’t want to put it down, eagerly coming back to it when I got home— now it’s 11pm and I’m an emotional wreck, crying at how beautiful, heartfelt, raw, intense, and tender this book is.

Nine stories that encompass a wide range of nuanced characters and plot directions, with bits and pieces overlapping here and there— not in any hugely climactic way but reminding us how interconnected everything is, how the world is rather large but can feel so small. Each story stands on its own but the whole just has a sort of gravitas and magic to it, lending importance to matters of everyday life. As we follow the meandering threads, I couldn’t help but marvel at the connections, finding myself drawn to these flashes of small town life and wanting to know more about every single character beyond these small snippets. It’s impossible to choose an outright favorite— with themes of grief, guilt, shame, anger, and love, each story hit me in unexpectedly personal ways. And the writing itself is so poetic and lyrical, it captivated me and I found myself hungrily drinking it in.

Surprisingly cathartic, this book ended up being just what I needed

Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s collection of short stories, Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town, portrays the struggles her teen characters are dealing with and how their interactions with others — family, friends, strangers — help them grow into new awareness and resilience. Issues range from grief over the loss of a parent, disappearance of a sibling, healing from sexual abuse, being gay in a rural community, dealing with pressures to conform, sibling relationships, and more. Though the issues are clear to the reader, they are not presented in a graphic manner. Throughout, Hitchcock counters the harm inflicted by characters and society with the power of individuals and community to help themselves and each other.

The stories are set during the 1990s in small towns in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, Washington, and Alaska. Hitchcock’s writing captures not only the physical details of these rural landscapes but the emotional tenor of daily life for teens. Typically, her characters and their lives are messy, a bit muddled, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes anguished. Both the girls and guys in these stories have a lot of heart, and ultimately, strength.

Interconnectedness runs throughout this collection. Numerous characters figure in more than one story, sometimes significantly and sometimes tangentially. Several locations are repeated. Likewise, a few plot elements occur in several stories — wildfire, an abusing priest, a renegade radio personality. Readers expecting to have all these pieces tied up into a single narrative, as in Hitchcock’s novel The Smell of Other People’s Houses, may be disappointed. However, if taken for what it is, a gathering of stories about rural teens in the West and Alaska dealing with life, those sometimes random or loose connections underscore one of Hitchcock’s major themes: that we humans are linked more than we realize — and how we treat each other makes a difference.