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The opening story, \u201cWhere Are You, Really?\u201d, brilliantly chronicles the implosion of a middle-aged mother and wife who had chosen \u201cprofession second, motherhood first,\u201d only to be shunned by her school-skipping teenage daughter. After failing to make partner, again, at the same law firm where her globe-trotting husband has soared, Eveyln has had it. She grabs a bottle of red wine and heads to the tree house where her teenage kids left their weed. Then the police arrive.<\/p>\n
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One of my favorite stories is the taut and terrifying \u201cWake,\u201d the double meaning of its title one of its many precisions. Molly, trapped in a violently abusive marriage for 15 years, sits numbly at the wake after the sudden drunk-driving death of her husband.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly once,\u201d we learn, \u201cdid Molly dare confess her need to leave Paul, fearing he\u2019d kill her. \u2018Now, now,\u2019 Father Thomas said, his breath whisky-sour through the dark confessional screen. \u2018You mustn\u2019t let emotions cloud your thinking. Losing that baby was hard, I know.\u2019 He knew nothing. \u2018These things happen to test our faith.\u2019 He called it \u2018God\u2019s will\u2019 and reminded Molly to be \u2018subject in everything to your husband to achieve a state of grace.\u2019 Be silent in the flock, he meant, be fixed like a prie-dieu for Paul to kneel on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thankfully, Molly\u2019s friend Brenna is beside her at the wake, \u201cthe only one in this crowded house Molly can stand.\u201d<\/p>\n
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The story \u201cWar Paint\u201d\u2014told from the perspective of a NYC-based musician son on a quest to bring his once adventurous dad to New York for Christmas, chronicles the slow heartbreak of losing a father to dementia, after losing a mother to extreme mental illness years before. It\u2019s all there this Thanksgiving at his sister\u2019s house in Arizona where his father lives\u2014the tenderness of a young niece, the sternness of a born-again sister, the vagueness of an aging father, and the anger and impulsivity of a prodigal son. Gunther navigates the emotional tension within the family with such skill and grace, the reader feels not only present at this holiday gathering but gripped by the cascade of the emotions themselves.<\/p>\n
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The final story, \u201cSave Me,\u201d features a young woman who has left the Mormon faith of her large family and is living a spare but independent life in San Luis Obispo in Mexico. She alone among her many siblings cannot forgive the rigidity of their religion and the heartbreaking cost wrought on a beloved brother. Hannah, the protagonist, is painting and purging her apartment of the \u201cdetritus of the life she was shedding\u201d when she is visited\u2014again\u2014by yet two more young Mormon men sent by her family. The \u201cElders,\u201d as the young missionaries are called, try to convince her to return to the fold of her discarded faith, and the sense of belonging that still calls to her. Gunter expertly traverses this bittersweet differential between dissent and harmony.<\/p>\n
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