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.

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock was an incredible set of short stories. The difference in this collection is that there is a thread that connects one story to the next, and all of the stories included are then part of a larger overall story. I don't want to say too much because honestly the beauty and intrigue is in seeing those connections come to light. I will also say that many of these connections are through tragedy, so know that this is a story not only full of some twists and turns, but some pretty intense feelings. (Note: The book does have a content warning, and I would definitely suggest evaluating that before you dive in.) This was one of those books that absolutely drew me in so many ways - It was the plot above all else, but it was also just masterful storytelling. Thanks to NetGalley for an early look at this April 2021 release!

This book is a book of short stories. A piece of each story is loosely threaded through the next. One action leading to a consequence for themselves or someone else.

I liked how the book was set up. I wish we got more from some of the stories. I wanted to connect more with some of the characters. I would really like to read more about these characters and where the future takes them.

Overall review: Hitchcock has created a masterpiece short-story collection. She is so great at characterization that every single one of them feels unbelievably real. She’s also amazing at capturing small town environments and all the hidden things within them. All the stories weave together in ways I truly did not expect but were complete perfection. The writing style is raw and honest with hints of lyricism. I absolutely recommend it to everyone interested in slice-of-life stories. You can see my (rambly) reviews of individual stories below with content warnings. If one story has content that triggers you, you can still get a lot out of the collection, but you might miss the easter egg references.

Angry Starfish: 5 stars, great visualization, truly captures grief, I really enjoyed it. CW: grief, death of a parent

Pigeon Creek: 4 stars, I didn’t realize the stories were connected, her writing is so realistic, this was very dramatic like watching a car crash (lmao), plays with the senses. CW: car crash, sex, infidelity, alcohol

Sea Shaken Houses: 5 stars, this is absolutely my favorite so far, so much imagery, the characterization was beautiful, great plot *chef’s kiss* I want more, I love Jane. CW: body horror, death, sexual assault

Parking Lot Flowers: 4.5 stars, this one was a lot darker, easy to feel the characters emotions, tells an entire story in such a short story. CW: sexual assault, homophobia

The Right Kind of People: 5 stars, so good and dark and fiery. Amazing wordsmithing, gross and gritty like the subject at hand. CW: sexual assault, sexual content

Basketball Town: 4.75 stars, I love how the stories are weaved together, this was a great way to show familial pressure, I wish it was longer to make the story as fully fleshed as the others. CW: sexism, anti-native racism

Alaska Was Wasted on Us: 4 stars, this one felt a bit more juvenile than the rest but it did make my heart race with suspense. CW: mild child missing

The Stranger in the Woods: 4.5 stars still not as deep or fleshed out as the earlier ones, but still overall really good at analyzing relationships and the hidden things in small towns, specifically trust and gossip. Also, the connections are so good, the one didn’t hit me until after I finished and I literally gasped. CW: child murder, possible adult/minor relationship

There’s Gas in the Tank, Louise!: 5 stars, this literally made me cry, it is so emotional. I love the unreliable narrator and I think the way it was done was amazing. This was a good story to wrap up the collection. CW: drugs, child death

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

This was a great collection of short stories. I love how different characters and storylines overlapped and were woven together. The more I read short stories, the more I love them.

I am so in awe of the way that the author manages to write in such an emotionally meaningful way and each of her words carries such weight. She masterfully packs the most vital of information to create characters that come alive through each of their sections. All of the stories were so skillfully connected and ultimately telling of how interlinked we all are as humans. It also emphasized how vital it is to listen to each other's stories to better understand people near and far. My biggest criticism is how short the book was. I would have liked a couple more stories. But I think that's just telling of how enchanting Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock's writing is, and how difficult it is to leave the towns she paints.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this book, and I very much welcomed that. The idea of loosely interconnected short stories chronicling the significance of the minutiae of small town life intrigued me. Normally, when reviewing an anthology, I’d go story-by-story, but this collection of stories clearly asks to be looked at as a whole. However, I ultimately found it lackluster. It told far more than it showed.

The stories became, after a point, very repetitive. Each was so short that no one felt quite fleshed out enough, and they were all so wrapped in little hazy details that it was hard to keep track of names, places. While this warped sense of being out of place and time aided the atmosphere of the whole book and had the potential to heighten the lyrical quality, I just felt inundated with metaphor, analogy, and detail to the point where nothing felt like it held all that much weight.

The note about the author’s own history with fire/wildfire/climate change was very illuminating and certainly shed light on that aspect of the book, but the element of fire felt very forced in execution, very wedged in, in most of the stories. I couldn’t figure out its purpose in the majority of the tales, and it really only “mattered” in one or two. I wish I had gleaned something more signficiant from it.

While some of these stories were satisfying to read, I felt mainly bored by each one. I couldn’t grasp onto any universality here, yet it felt like I was meant to. I love reading about small towns, these communities that so many people just pass through and glance over, but something just didn’t stick here, nothing was tangible enough. Hitchcock set her scenes perfectly, but I wish I knew what to do once I sat down within them.

Short stories—all interconnected, remind you about ourselves, how we are all interconnected, how everyone has a story.

This little book of stories exposes how thoughtlessly we can make quick judgements about others. We can make judgements about people based on how they rush past us on the street or how they've parked their car. Yet they too have their own stories, their own hurt, parents, children, sickness, finances to think about. You never know and quick judgements can be (and often are!) wrong.

Everyone has a story.

Really enjoyed this book! Definitely one of the best books read this year/2021.

There are (over) a dozen books downloaded to my phone or computer; so this morning I decided that I ought give them all 1/2 hour, pick my favorite and finish my favorite. And then I read (listened via iphone and Siri) almost non-stop from 6am to 3:30pm.

There are a lot of characters in this book, but it wasn't difficult to keep track of them. This is a book that is going to stick with me for a while.
This is Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock's second book; I missed her first book and will be adding it to my overwhelming TBR pile. oops.

I was wondering when I would stumble upon covid 19 facemasks in a novel!

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher Random House/Wendy Lamb Books and the author Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock for the opportunity to read this advance read copy in exchange for an honest review. Publication date is April 20, 2021.

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is a beautiful piece. I have to praise the flow as it is what makes Everyone Dies Famous so unique. Every person connects so well into place. Additionally, every story teaches a different lesson, so there is a lot to take away after reading.

There are quite a few content warnings for readers to be aware of. At the beginning of the book, there is a sexual abuse warning. I would also note that pedophilia, murder, drug use, homophobia, wildfire, and religious trauma are other topics mentioned. While these are all difficult topics, Hitchcock does a great job with them.

I would recommend this book for ages 15+ (about high school ages and up) solely due to the heavy topics mentioned.

I think Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is a book to look out for. I believe there are people out there who need to read this, especially teens. An overall great read.

Rating: Really Enjoyed

This book was honestly a joy to read. I devoured in less than 24 hours.

It is a collection of short stories featuring teens from small towns throughout the West and Alaska, and is honestly just a slice of life. We get a window into their family dynamics, their dating lives, their friendship struggles, and the difficulties that they are facing. The best thing is that all the stories intertwine and come together to tell a larger narrative.

I am usually not a fan of short stories because I end up feeling like I am missing so much of the backstory and what comes next. With this collection though, there are tendrils woven throughout all of the stories tying them together and making it feel complete, even as we moved onto a new place and new characters in almost every story. That was really what made this book complete for me.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a change of pace and wants to read something different from their usual fare. I also feel like it is great for character readers because there was a lot of depth to these characters and they are really what drove each of the individual stories.

I don't really have any complaints; however, I will say that it took a couple stories for me to be fully engrossed in the larger narrative and to begin to appreciate the short story format.

There are some sensitive topics covered in this book and it has a content warning at the beginning for a strand connected to the memory of sexual abuse.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children's for an advance copy in return for an honest review. Per stated request, my full review will not be be posted to GoodReads or my Instagram (@jemofabook) until two weeks prior to publication.

[2.5 stars]

I don’t usually read anthologies—or stories about small towns. I’m a city girl. I’m used to commuting to school and passing person upon person, all of their stories invisible to me. (although, that hasn’t been the case for nearly a year now—thanks covid) Small towns are the opposite of this. Everyone is intimately aware of everyone else’s life—their successes, their failures, their joys and their tragedies.

That’s pretty much the basis for this story. Nine intimately interwoven stories. All from small towns. All impactful and passionate and full of the the fiery, all consuming feeling of being a teenager. Personally, I love the idea. I love books that connect seemingly disconnected people, weaving their lives and stories in and out of one another, despite being hundreds of miles or decades apart. When it’s well done, it’s effortless and beautiful and frequently heartbreaking.

"It was so easy to make people believe what they want to believe. Until it wasn’t."

If I’m being completely honest, I’m still not 100% sure how I feel about this book. My immediate thoughts were that it wasn’t that good. But that’s not entirely true. There were actually two stories that I really enjoyed. But then again, 2/9 isn’t a very good statistic.

The two stories that I did enjoy were beautiful, full of breathtaking prose made for two heartbreaking and memorable stories. Said two stories were Parking-Lot Flowers (which is an image I am now obsessed with and determined to use somewhere) and The Right Kind of People. If you can get this from the library, I would definitely recommend doing so, if only for those two stories. I don’t think it’s worth purchasing though.

Parking-Lot Flowers and The Right Kind of People are wonderfully done short stories. Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (at least sometimes) knows how to use details to paint a broad picture. Sometimes all the details, the little bits of information, in such a compact format, become crowded and heavy and confusing, but it’s quite the opposite here. Here, the details lift the stories up and off the page. The sentences feel magical and light, and the writing takes on a tangible quality.

"The scattered sea-shaken houses on the cliffs overlooking the ocean had been built long ago, but they mirrored the people who came and went: reclusive and solitary, wind-beaten and up for grabs."

But that, unfortunately, is only two stories. The other nine, while not unpleasant to read, fall flat. They’re not bad, precisely, but they aren’t very good either. The sentences are neither heavy or light, they’re simply there.

Okay, last thing: I was listening to music while writing this post and Million Dollar Secret by Lucius came on and I thought it was perfect for this book so now it’s part of the post. I was going to use the Spotify embed but I didn’t like the way it looked👀so a link it is.

THE FINAL VERDICT: If you can get it from the library, or borrow it, or sit down in a bookstore for a bit, or in anyway get your hands on a copy without buying it yourself, 100% read Parking-Lot Flowers and The Right Kind of People. Otherwise, I’d pass.

Huge thanks to NetGalley, the publisher, and author for providing an arc in exchange for an honest review. The above quotes were taken from an arc and are subject to change upon publication.

I quite enjoyed this short story collection. I enjoyed the atmospheric small town vibe and over arching characters: a character in one story usually was somehow related/involved with the next and so on. The stories were rather short, quite a quick read for an anthology. I do think some stories missed a bit of depth/resolution, but that was to be expected. They also touched on some rather darker topics including death/grief, murder, pedophilia. I enjoyed some stories more than others and I think some characters will stay with me longer, but there was a lot of variety which I enjoyed. If you can I recommend keeping a character sheet/reference as there are a lot of names. I had a bit of trouble keeping track of who was who and what happened to them.

I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately, I just couldn't get into it! I think it might've been the short story format, or just a matter of being in the right headspace. Hopefully I'll be able to revisit this book later and I'll be able to connect with it more!

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town explores how trauma can tear apart and connect individuals. Each chapter follows a different teenager in a small town in the United States. From Alaska to Colorado to Texas, each of these heartbreaking stories are connected by a central horrific event - the disappearance of a young girl. This book asks - How do we survive when tragedy strikes? And how do we still manage to form relationships and connections through these tragic times?

I have recommended this book to everyone who will listen. I found it deeply heartbreaking and, yet, hopeful. The characters are complex and interesting, even if we only spend a chapter or so with them. The plot and layout of the book manages to be unique without losing or distracting the reader. This is the kind of book that stays with a reader forever, in the best possible way.

A few years back, I narrated the audiobook for Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s The Smell of Other People’s Houses. So when I saw that she had a new book coming out I was so excited and ready to get my hands on it!! I didn’t read too deeply into the synopsis before starting the book, before diving in. All I knew was that it was a short story collection and the title... which gave me some idea. I was pleasantly surprised that all the stories ended up being connected to each other in some way and built off of each one. It reminded me of Bonnie-Sue’s first book with the multiple perspectives and seeing how they all connected. It’s something I really enjoy about her storytelling style!

The stories themselves felt like an ode to small towns and the communities they hold. Small towns get a reputation for being places where nothing happens, life stands still. But these stories are bursting with life, love, heartbreak, tragedy, and more. The characters were great and I especially loved seeing them through new perspectives when they popped up in different stories. I most related to 2 characters in one of the stories who are not outdoorsy camping types, but because they’re Alaskan people expect them to be experts. Very relatable. I flew through the book and think many of you would enjoy it as well. Releases in April!

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

TW: sexual assault

I really really wanted to like this book. I had read the other book this author wrote, The Smell of Other Peoples’ Houses and did like it so I thought I would probably like this book as well. Unfortunately, maybe due to the short story format, or the forgettability of the plot and characters, I couldn’t truly get into this book. I’m usually a big fan of following multiple perspectives and people in books as long as I have the time to get to know each character, but because these were short stories I didn’t have the time, so a lot of the stories went over my head. What I did appreciate about the book was uncovering how each of the stories were connected to one another. I think the way in which the author skillfully and purposefully wove the stories together was beautiful and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I settled at a three stars for this book because a majority of the time I was just bored while reading this book, and the other half, I did read some stories that talked about important themes like depression, grief, friendship, and sexual assault. I feel like I probably would have loved the book if the stories were expanded on, but alas, this was a mediocre read at best. I’d still recommend it to anyone who likes short stories, I think I’ve learned that I’m not a huge fan of them unless they’re like romance novellas.

Characters: 5/10
Atmosphere: 6/10
Writing Style: 7/10
Plot: 6/10
Intrigue: 4/10
Logic: 5/10
Enjoyment: 5/10

Rating: 5.4 or 3 stars

Thanks to @netgalley for an advance copy of this book!

Real talk: I struggle with finishing short story collections. I like individual short stories, but without a thread to follow, I sometimes find myself lost in the woods. Fortunately, that didn’t stop me from picking up Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town. I loved Bonnie Sue-Hitchcock’s debut, The Smell of Other People’s Houses, so I immediately requested an ARC when I found out she had written another book. The Smell of Other People’s Houses was a stunning book that did a lot in just a couple hundred pages, so I hoped that the stories in Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town would be just as good. I was right. Bonnie Sue-Hitchcock captures the messiness and nuance of youth that often gets painted over by stereotypes of young people. I ached for these characters. I love that each story was like a window into the life of a character, just a glimpse, just enough to leave me wanting more. I love that the stories DO have a thread - the characters are all connected, although they don’t realize it. I love the depictions of small towns. I love the way that these stories remind us to listen.

TW: pedophilia

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is one of the more interesting books I have read recently as far as storytelling is concerned. The author has interwoven a bunch of short stories to create an overlapping and interconnected narrative. Through these stories, themes like friendship, revenge, love, secrets, and family are dug into in such a way that even, seemingly, the most innocent and simple lives of people who live in small towns turn out to be complicated and, in some cases, dark

Written for grades seventh and up, some of the themes are rather mature, but Hitchcock writes in such a way that most readers of this age group will be able to handle the content. Moreover, the reader sees that eventually, all mistakes and sins have their own consequences. This book gives you something to think about after the last story is over, that's for sure.

Thank you to Random House Children's Publishing for granting me an advanced copy. Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is set for publication April 20, 2021.

Is February too early to declare my favorite book of 2021? If so, I can't deny that Everyone Dies in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock is an absolute contender. This collection of gently intertwined short stories is not only lyrical in writing, but powerful with story, and I was connected to the book from page one. There are a total of nine stories, all set in small towns on the west coast or Alaska, where the world at large seems to be closing in on a teenager's life, all while wild fires rage, threatening each community's way of life. As the reader moves through the stories, letting go of one set of characters for a new set, they realize each group is connected by some means, be it a thin or steady connection; and nearly every event has great impact on other events. I know that's a vague way to describe these important connections that tie the stories together, giving the book the feel of a novel, but almost every relationship, every cause and effect sequence, is revealed in such a beautiful, touching way, highlighting Hitchcock's outstanding talent as an artist of words, I hesitate to spoil any of the reveals for future readers.

Moving beyond the connecting stories, which were of utmost importance to me and brought me great satisfaction, I can't neglect to discuss another aspect of the the book that makes it a special addition to any YA collection: the portrayal of the teens. I am no longer a teen myself, but I'm raising a few, and I work directly with them as a teen librarian, but for 133 pages I visited my teen self. The freshness of a broken heart, the worry about not being good enough, the desire to fit in and belong...it all came back. And, I found myself recognizing the strength of the characters. Honestly, if I had read these stories as a teen myself, they would have inspired me to grow and to trust in myself.

Overall, Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town is an exceptional book. It's the kind that stays with you long after you finish the last page. I can't wait for this book to come out, and I can't wait to put it in the hands of readers. I'll be using it as part of a new project for my library system as well. In short, I want this book to reach readers (adults readers included) and I'll share it any way I can.