Quickening

For the most part, the stories take place on an island locale, but range widely in subject, character, and design. A story like Man With the Axe , which deals with creativity within the context of a testy brother-sister relationship, moves along in a fairly traditional way, while Unfinished is composed of a shattered narrative, a collage of grief and anger that reflects the distraction of its speaker. The stories told are familiar ones, of loss and generational conflict and obsession, though the angle taken is often idiosyncratic and the humour admittedly quirky. The odd ghost may slip in; a dog may be given his intellectual due. The author has allowed the actual and believable to flirt with the imagined, the fantastic. In places, she confesses, to have stretched the truth until its face resembles one you might encounter in a funhouse. But then, when you meet up with it, the truth isn’t always a beautiful friend.