Click here to read RCWMS Communications Director Meghan Florian’s review of Whiskey & Ribbons for The Englewood Review of Books.
Whiskey & Ribbons, Leesa Cross-Smith’s first novel, is a love story folded inside of a love story. It is a novel about grief, about family, about how we hold one another together when everything falls apart.
The character at the heart of the novel, by my reading, is Evangeline, who goes by Evi, but the story is told in three voices – Evi herself, her deceased husband Eamon, and Eamon’s best friend Dalton. In the hands of a less skilled storyteller, the book’s multivocal structure might be unwieldy or confusing, but Cross-Smith deftly moves from present to past and back again, from voice to voice, inhabiting and revealing each character with melodic grace.
Leave a Reply