BookDragon Blog

*STARRED REVIEW
Ladee Hubbard (The Rib King) showcases the same brilliant, biting insight of her novels in an expert debut short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. She builds an indelible Black community through 13 interlinked stories, mostly set in an unnamed “suburbia of the south.” She assigns each story a year – from 1992 to 2007 – marking 15 years during which certain characters evolve and too many others devolve.

It’s 1992 in “Flip Lady,” when a grieving mother considers “when exactly the good little boys standing on your back porch became the big bad men walking out your front door.” One son is dead. Her surviving son reappears in “Trash,” set in 2005 New Orleans, attempting to entertain new pale neighbors. In “Bitch: An Etymology of Family Values,” 24-year-old Millicent Jones alerts her lover’s wife that the law is finally about to arrest her “hooch and cooch”-addicted councilman husband. Five years later, Millie is servicing a backseat hook-up in “Five People Who Crave Sauce” to pay the bills that keep her grandmother safe. Two years later, in the titular story, Millicent has notably assumed the assistant directorship of the Leon Moore Center for Creative Unity, a community haven named after a wrongfully imprisoned dentist-turned-activist. Leon’s brother Henry recurs in several stories as the proprietor of Henry’s Bar (another local hangout of quite a different sort), introduced in “Henry” and dead in “Paulie Sparks.”

Hubbard’s characters are rash and wise, angry and empathic, ready to rage against the powerful, desperate for rest, fighting and losing and fighting again. A brilliant storyteller, Hubbard writes impeccably with candid observations and enthralling revelations.

Discover: Award-winning novelist Ladee Hubbard transfers her brilliant storytelling skills to produce a collection of 13 exceptional, intricately interlinked short stories.

Review: “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, March 8, 2022

Readers: Adult

Published: 2022