Book Review: Company by Shannon Sanders
I came to Shannon Sanders’ debut short story collection by a fortunate detour. I received an advance reader copy of her upcoming novel, The Great Wherever (side note: watch this space for my upcoming review). While I was reading her novel, I found myself so thoroughly captivated by her voice that I went back to see what else she had written. In Company, I discovered a collection of rare beauty and emotional depth.
This interconnected collection of stories is centered on a Black American family, and Sanders handles that architecture with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly where every thread leads. The stories feature masterfully crafted characters who inhabit a world, a bloodline, and a set of inherited truths. In this collection (as well as her full-length novel) Sanders distinguishes herself as an authority on capturing the texture of Black American family life, including the unspoken hierarchies and the love that passes between generations not through grand declarations but through a legacy of tenderness, resilience, and the particular kind of inheritance that cannot be written into a will but is nonetheless passed down faithfully from one generation to the next. This is exemplified by Dragonflies, one of my favorite stories in the collection. It centers on a family in the immediate aftermath of losing and burying their matriarch, and the quiet, tectonic shift that follows as the eldest daughter steps into that vacancy. Sanders renders the complexity of that succession with a realistic sensitivity, as grief, power, and love become entangled in the family dynamics.
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Then, there is her prose, which is a consistent pleasure throughout. Her sentences are constructed with care: short and declarative, landing with quiet force; other times longer, winding through memory and feeling with an unhurried elegance that trusts the reader to follow. The result is memorable lines like these:
When the cast came off, he would feel as though he’d been fired from a cannon, an unstoppable projectile who ran instead of walked whenever possible and, through this experience, would finally come to understand why, after surviving all those years with Lee, his father nonetheless could not survive a single solitary second with her post-crutches.
Sanders’ pacing is equally assured. She knows when to slow a story down to near-stillness and when to let it move, and that instinct gives each piece a rhythm that feels organic rather than engineered. She never over-explains, never over-emotes. The language itself does the emotional work, and it does it beautifully.
Company is a gift: a simple yet profound ode to the Black American family.
