Review: Diane Simmons' Little America
There is something about the open spaces of the American West that tugs at the wanderers among us. Whether we've explored it first-hand or paid only brief visits via the cinema screen, the western landscape – in places devoid of human habitation, with a harsh and rugged beauty – intrigues our vagabond spirits and draws us in. The eight stories in Diane Simmons' Little America are set amid this vast and unknowable backdrop and populated by a cast of rootless wanderers, some trying to escape their pasts, others searching for a future somewhere beyond the ever receding horizon. In the title story, we join Hank and Lorraine, a pair of small-time fraudsters moving from one town to the next. With them is Hank's young daughter, Billie, from whose perspective the story is told. As we travel beside her, we see that the story is not so much about Billie's relationships with the adults in the car, but instead about the unknown territory of her own identity: “Billie…knew [Ha