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The Stepmother
The narrator held my attention most because she is so open about her contradictions. She can be defensive, angry, funny, generous, suspicious, and deeply tired, sometimes within the same stretch of the story. I kept thinking about the contrast between her firm rule that no man should get close to her children and the way Shawn, his daughter, and eventually more of his family become woven into her home. Her care for the girls is especially affecting: buying supplies, helping with hair, sitting with Cee Cee through period pain, and trying to give them the celebrations their mother did not. At the same time, the resentment building around that care feels painfully believable, particularly when all those sacrifices are treated as if they meant nothing. The ending leaves her in a difficult, unresolved place rather than offering an easy victory, and that suits the life she has described. The story is sprawling and sometimes hard to follow, but the confessional voice makes it feel like someone urgently trying to be heard. I wanted to know what she would do next, even when her decisions made the situation more complicated.
Marcus Reed