The characters in Think of Me and I’ll Know, Anthony Varallo’s probing new collection of stories, face moments in which insight comes too late, or proves insufficient, often to humorous effect. The characters approach the edge of learning something about themselves or about their relationships with other people, only to be left with knowledge that is not particularly useful.

Varallo ably captures the often confused and heartrending perspective of adolescents discovering the world, such as in
No One at All,
in which an eleven-year-old boy comes to see that another boy, two years older, is something less than a reliable friend. The author also captures the complications of family dynamics, such as the three generations of women in the related stories
Lucky Us
and
Tragic Little Me.
The stories in Think of Me and I’ll Know show that we are perhaps not much more comprehensible to ourselves than others are to us.