The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 May 2007
by Linda Watanabe McFerrin
The short story is today a fairly neglected genre. Its heyday was, perhaps, back in a time when magazines were widely read in the absence of something like television or video games. Maybe that's an overstatement. The practitioners of the short story, however, include some of the biggest names in literature. The art of the short story is still carried on in magazines like The New Yorker, most notably, but also within the pages of countless small literary journals across the globe. Who reads all these? One might guess mostly other writers. Writers of short stories will, of course, study the craft through the publications of others. Anyway, the author of this collection of short stories is also a teacher of writing courses in the SF Bay Area. The book includes a dozen good to excellent stories that are connected by their diverse exotic locales and a distinctly feminine point of view. In each of the stories, a woman is experiencing a transition, some change in her life that calls for a solution, material or spiritual. And, in each, McFerrin finds a moment of peace, reconciliation or acceptance. The author succeeds variously in each case, with the title story being the best in the collection. In it, she reflects upon the changes in family relationships that come about when one suffers from Alzheimer's disease. Her depiction of the transformations of the illness, and the dilemma of caregivers, is sensitive and gentle. In other stories, we read of the transformations of aging, child-bearing, child-rearing and the formation of relationships. All in all, the writing is often moving, engaging and compact. A couple of the stories are less convincing than others, but, overall, the collection is solid.