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Assessment:
Plot: The author's structural choices allow the reader to get into Robert's head and the many characters who populate Ybor City.
Prose/Style: Costa's prose is conversational, the immediacy of his descriptions at once both engaging and quietly lyrical.
Originality: Costa shines a spotlight on the lives of cabinetmakers, a unique trade with a unique past.
Character Development/Execution: The characters are disparate, coming from many different backgrounds. Each are given their due, and the reader learns something surprising about all of them.
Blurb: This collection of short stories is knit together with wit and humanity. Joseph Allen Costa has fashioned an intimate tale of the cabinetmakers of Ybor City.
Date Submitted: July 24, 2021
The linked stories in Joseph Costa's Comets remind me of fiction by the late great Denis Johnson and Thom Jones. Costa, like those writers, writes movingly, hilariously, and empathetically about people on the margins: boxers, veterans, petty criminals, not-so-petty criminals, strivers, strays of all kinds, and especially the cabinet makers of Tampa, Florida. The characters in these stories are hard-boiled, but they care—about each other, and about life, which hasn't quite worked out for them, but might, yet, and soon. Maybe even in the next story. It's impossible for the reader not to care about them, and root for them, too. What a wonderful book!
Joseph Costa’s Comets cuts across the literary cosmos searing his signature in the stars. These stories feature blue-collar Floridians caught in the teeth of the daily grind. Many of the pieces examine the complexities of family and the devastating ways that honor, tradition, and responsibility create fissures in the human spirit. But no matter how far we plummet into deep-space darkness, with wisdom and kindness, Costa always finds a way to scatter light.
Joseph Costa's Comets is a loving intergenerational look at Ybor City and the men who built it and were built by it. The collection is as insightful and satisfying and full of Lawrence's "subtle interrelatedness" as any novel. It hums with buried circuitry."