THE FRANKLIN AVENUE ROOKERY FOR WAYWARD BABIES

Ranging from Nepal to Tijuana to Rome and beyond, Newman’s second collection explores how people from disparate countries, cultures, and circumstances come together.

The title story is about a girl who grows up in an orphanage in New Orleans that isn’t quite what it seems, and while it isn’t the book's strongest, it does demonstrate many of the author’s strengths. Newman excels at succinctly providing her characters with rich histories and pacing the surprising, well-executed turns in some of the stories. She can be inventive with form and creative with plotting. The story “Swisher Sweets,” for example, plays with chronology and point of view to show how complicated grief is as a woman mourns the death of her ex-husband while managing his affairs on behalf of their grown children and her former mother-in-law. There are also moments of tenderness and insight. In “The House of Naan and Saffron,” the first-person narrator, reflecting on his Norwegian family’s time in India as missionaries, says of his parents, “If my father was a stingy moralist and my mother an occasional drunk, they covered for each other, and under that cover I was safe.” Later he says, “It is easier to play the rebel of your own life than to actually lead it.” Other stories show off a dark sense of humor. But there are moments when the writing feels heartless rather than funny or clever. “Sweet Nothings,” a story about a friendship between two men living in Tijuana, is clumsy in its use of Spanish and stereotypical imagery like mariachis and jumping beans. It includes a callous quip about “an alien (outer space, not illegal).” In "The Little Ice Girl," also set in Tijuana, Newman writes, “On this day Ana wore the dress her grandmother hand-stitched out of flour sacks; she looked like a faded, walking billboard for tortillas. A triangle of calico pulled her black hair back from her churro-brown face.” These insensitivities distract from otherwise skillful storytelling.

An eclectic if uneven collection of short stories.