Acts of Contrition

The women in Acts of Contritionface society’s devaluation, from parents, from elders, from all who assume authority of them. Some can look back and laugh, some find luck in their escape from harm, some engineer their own good fortune. They battle oppressions as simple as gender stereotyping, as complex as prerequisites to friendship or love. What all the characters come to understand is that silence places them at greater risk than speaking out. They progress toward freedom through the telling of their stories.
“Acts of Contrition is a great collection, one I read in a single sitting, the stories sly and engaging, hilariously dark and always surprising. The women of Victoria Waddle's fiction are characters I'd spend much more time with—they are brutally honest, have excellent talents at remembering, and they soldier on with grace and humor and wine."
—Susan Straight, author of eight novels, including Highwire Moon, and one memoir, In the Country of Women
“In ‘Solvent,’ one of the later stories in this collection, a reformed Evangelical-Christian-turned-New-agey-vegan-spiritual pyramid scheme saleswoman demonstrates the effectiveness of a caustic cleaning product over an heirloom dining table to a pair of tipsy Mormon missionary boys and a mother-daughter team of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In this one anecdote, the entire collection is distilled.”
—Cati Porter, author of The Body at a Loss, Director of Inlandia Institute
“I love Victoria Waddle’s Acts of Contrition for the way it sees life not as mundane but as meaningful. What a lesser writer might have missed about the meaning of those moments that pass us by, Waddle is able to explore, and her stories are extraordinary. They are magic. They draw out both the absurdity of personal mythologies found in tarot cards, prayers, and omens and the wonder in them as well. They find the magic in the extraordinary and in the every day.”
—John Brantingham, Poet Laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park