CALL UP THE WATERS

Ten stories that paint vivid characters in emotionally resonant moments.

The short stories in this collection often describe dramatic events—a cabin washed away; a boy dead in a fire—but they center subtleties of emotional life. Racial diversity isn’t explicit, and apart from mentions of a migrant family, character descriptions don’t suggest it. But the stories feature a welcome range of economic backgrounds: a wealthy father who uses his money to assuage a personal sense of guilt; a girl whose family can’t quite scrape together $1.50 for a plastic razor. Throughout the collection, we encounter characters through details that don’t coalesce into revelation or diagnosis. A mother’s fixation with divining rods sends her wandering canyons at night; she embraces trees because it “chases away bad thoughts”; and her knitting basket is full of unfinished projects. But we don’t know why she is like this, what a name for it might be. In the poignant final story, a woman struggles to reconcile everything she knows about her niece—her watchful demeanor, the way she picks at her food, the trouble she causes her parents—and comes up short. “Do you want to know where she was, what she was doing? (She will refuse to say.)” This willingness to describe without arriving at answers might frustrate readers accustomed to short stories that end with a flourish of insight or irony. But the achievement of these stories has more to do with emotional movement than a point of arrival. This approach creates a sense of depth and realism: These characters exist beyond the moments the text describes; their world is not restricted to a story arc.

A collection that patiently renders emotional depth without recourse to angst or melodrama.