Margins
The Staked Plains book cover
The Staked Plains
2015
First Published
3.80
Average Rating
170
Number of Pages

Jenny is a bad psychic when she arrives in Querosa, not because she doesn't possess the powers, but she can't control them. To her husband, an archaeologist at the local college, she seems little more than a sexual object. Querosa is in shambles. Farmhands and workers barely eke out a living and when the Great Drought sets in, ranchers are forced to sell their land and local businesses shutter. Only churches seem to prosper. Querosa is suspicious of Jenny's gift, yet people begin seeking her out. They divulge their secrets and ask desperate questions about the future. Advising - and befriending - a gay teenager and a struggling farmer's wife, Jenny slowly uncovers the town's many layers of discrimination, hatred, and violence. When the feral boy Haag appears in her backyard, armed men set up camp in abandoned trailers outside of town, and farms burn to the ground, Jenny abandons her role as a bystander, with disastrous results. Quickly sliding from telling futures to finding water and brutally driving out cancer by attacking the body, she begins to understand that her powers are as out-of-control as is her marriage and her sordid relationship with a predatory banker. The people who once sought her help turn against her, and Jenny is forced to make momentous decisions about herself, her family, and Haag.

Avg Rating
3.80
Number of Ratings
40
5 STARS
33%
4 STARS
30%
3 STARS
25%
2 STARS
10%
1 STARS
3%
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Author

Stefan Kiesbye
Author · 5 books
Stefan Kiesbye has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan. Born on the German coast of the Baltic Sea, he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s. He studied drama and worked in radio before starting a degree in American studies, English, and comparative literature at Berlin’s Free University. A scholarship brought him to Buffalo, New York, in 1996. Kiesbye now lives in Portales, NM, where he teaches Creative Writing at Eastern New Mexico University. His stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, and his first book, Next Door Lived a Girl, won the Low Fidelity Press Novella Award.
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