Blood and Milk: A Novel in Stories creates a memorable modern character in Becky Hawkins, whose struggles to care for her senile grandfather and brain-injured child are told with tenderness and an awareness of the comic incongruities of life. "Blackmon seems to inhabit the wife and mother at the center of these stories right down to her synapses. It's as if he knows not only her every thought but her every inflection, the exact phrases with which she speaks to herself in the privacy of her consciousness. There's not a sentence here without the mark of truth to it."-Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination: A Novel, and The Brief History of the Dead