The Art of Ruin

Suliman grew up as a street kid in Detroit. In jail, he began to understand himself as a man who can change things with his hands and his sense of beauty. When he meets Kate, an older woman who has always found her sense of worth in sexual relationships, she becomes his patron. Although she is unable to free herself from her own rigid sense of how things are supposed to be, Kate helps Suliman to reinvent himself as a successful artist, finding beauty and vitality in the urban landscape of Detroit.

Rhoda Stamell's fiction contains conflicts of novel proportion. She is a conduit for disparate urban voices, jamming characters who probably should be kept away from each other, into situations where interaction is a demand as important as breath. The voices of her people are true to the ear and to themselves. These are quirky, sometimes dangerous, citizens familiar with just missed opportunities.