Book Review: Tales of East and West Sparrow

Reviewed by Lauren Hayataka

A tender exploration of men at life’s crossroads, told with Appalachian honesty

Glenn Armocida’s Tales of East and West Sparrow and Other Stories is a thoughtful collection of faith-driven short stories that takes readers into the fictional communities of East and West Sparrow, nestled in the Pennsylvania Wilds. Here, everyday people wrestle with the weight of temptation, loneliness, grief, and forgiveness—and often discover that grace has been waiting for them all along.

What defines this collection is the thread of male loneliness. Armocida turns to the ordinary men of East and West Sparrow to do this: a farmer and a doctor, a moonshiner and a mechanic, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood. Each carries solitude like an inheritance, their struggles woven through the fabric of everyday life. In “Henry Shick v. the Egg Lady,” a longtime friendship falters under the strain of jealousy and addiction, while in “Twenty-Two Hours at Tillie’s House,” a man on the brink of collapse finds unexpected kinship with a lonely widow. Again and again, these stories circle back to the ache of men left behind, revealing how faith quietly threads its way through despair, often in ways that take both the characters and the reader by surprise.

Armocida writes with an ear for dialogue that feels inseparable from the Appalachian landscape—sharp, plainspoken, and deeply authentic to the rhythms of rural speech. Conversations carry as much weight as action, revealing more in silence and hesitation than in direct confession.

In “The Bird Man of Sunken City,” a logger haunted by loss drifts into dreams that become visions of redemption, his voice shaped as much by the hills and rivers around him as by his faltering faith. The result is a quiet grace: a book less about drama than about reflection, more about the steady unfolding of ordinary lives than about emotional crescendos. As one character puts it, “I’ll get an answer when my heart is right.” Lines like this stay with you, not because they shatter, but because they pause and make you think.

That grace takes many forms in these stories, often through the presence of community. Sometimes it arrives through forgiveness, as in “The Street Called Straight;” other times through persistence, as in “Pinned.” Even in “The Bird Man of Sunken City,” grace is not solitary but shared, revealed not only in visions of sparrows but in the willingness of a congregation to see them as miracles.

Yet for all the nuances given to the men of East and West Sparrow, the women come across as somewhat flatter. They often appear less nuanced than the men, serving more as backdrops or catalysts for male reckonings than as fully realized people. The boldest story, “Dog Bones Changed Everything,” gestures toward reimagining the Mrs. Robinson archetype through the eyes of a teenager, but the woman at its center feels more symbolic than real. This imbalance is all the more apparent when set beside a story like “The Plum,” where retired men are drawn with remarkable depth, their conversations rich with questions of sacrifice, mortality, and what it means for life to change after work has ended. Still, Armocida’s greatest strength lies in his ability to capture the ordinariness of men with dignity, making their struggles both specific and universal.

By its end, Tales of East and West Sparrow and Other Stories leaves readers not with dramatic revelations but with a quiet sense of reflection. These stories remind us that grace is rarely loud; it comes in conversations, in community, and in the ordinary men who stumble toward faith with all their flaws intact. For readers drawn to faith-centered fiction or to Appalachian storytelling, Armocida’s collection offers a steady, contemplative grace.

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