Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley

Revisiting Blue Valley, the fictional locale of her first book, Small Caucasian Woman, Palencia describes, in 16 stories, life in the eastern foothills of the Kentucky Appalachians. ""Guard Your Man""--the opening entry and by far the strongest--is a galvanizing tale of a female coach and a scrappy high school girl's basketball team in 1961, a time when female participation in this sport had been outlawed in Kentucky public schools for several decades. The narrator muses, ""We were used to waiting beside a line we couldn't cross."" The tales that follow, though they adequately convey a sense of place, don't achieve the same level of intensity. The epistolary ""The Shoe Woman"" aims to depict the inklings of conscience in the haughty mindsets of two middle-aged DAR-type matrons, but their musings about poor people and servants is more tedious than revealing. Some illuminating moments are captured in ""The Smallest Show on Earth,"" in which a sad traveling salesman reckons with his misery while visiting a mysterious, doll-sized circus. But this story, like several others, ends on an inexplicable and inscrutable note. ""Not Paid For"" likewise switches gears confusingly: hot-tempered Dreama Forrester and her con-man husband, Floyd (who were introduced in Palencia's first book), reappear to serve as background for Dreama's elderly father's reminiscences about his work as a bill collector for the country doctor. The memories are poignant, filled with details of the Depression, but Palencia ends the tale with an abrupt, unsatisfying revelation about Dreama's origins. Themes of religion, illegitimate children, parent-child relationships and the supernatural run throughout, often with vivid energy and fresh insight, but overall, the thematic links don't unify the book or generate cohesion in individual stories. (Mar.)