Madrona Books

When you’re trapped in a Rust Belt town, time passes or it doesn’t. The people of Westinghouse, Ohio know this better than most. In Delinquents, their personal worlds expand and collapse in on themselves as they battle addictions, build scrap-metal rocket ships, and tether themselves to plans that will either get them out of dodge or blow up in their faces.

A former Deadhead seeks sobriety in his hometown, though his decades-old childhood trauma has been exhumed and now awaits him. A sometimes-recovering addict asks his younger sister to put him up as he repairs cars in their yard and she scrabbles to keep her own sanity. A woman intending to follow her boyfriend out of town wonders why a newcomer in Westinghouse has captured her latent interest.

Nick Rees Gardner’s linked stories portray people as they are: alternately hilarious, desperate, resilient, broken. For the characters contained in Delinquents, the crux is determining which they’ll be when the music stops.