WILDFLOWERS

Parayno offers glimpses into the lives of distressed Filipinas in this debut short fiction collection.

An unhappy 11-year-old girl experiences a sexual awakening while attempting to avoid her immigrant father’s violent temper (“Saviour”). A middle-aged woman is fired from her housekeeping job for sleeping with her employer’s father, then forced to travel all the way to Manila to take a new job in the household of a disgraced government official with a dark reputation (“Housecleaning”).A young woman (who can’t have children) and her boyfriend allow a visiting pregnant couple to spend the night at their apartment, which inevitably brings up painful comparisons: “How is it that Charles and Janie have everything that she and Winston do not?” the woman wonders. “One thin wall made of plaster and wood, dividing two couples on different paths” (“Dilation”). “Victory Joe” follows a woman who has somehow managed to keep her family alive during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines; the Americans have liberated the country and started to rebuild the infrastructure, but the woman’s rapidly declining health makes her a pariah in her community and a burden on her husband and son. In these nine stories, set in the Philippines, the United States, and the British Isles, the author explores the various pressures placed on women at different times of life. Parayno excels at capturing the ways characters are shaped by their particular cultural settings. Her elegant prose is full of sharp details, as when the childless woman, who is Filipino American, thinks about dinners with her boyfriend’s Chinese family: “At her family dinners, the dishes were laid out in the containers they were cooked in or in aluminum trays saved from previous parties, spread haphazardly across the counter, with a stack of thin paper plates, plastic utensils, and scratchy paper napkins.” Standouts include the eponymous “Wildflowers” and the Ireland-set “Surrender,” but nearly every story here leaves an impression.

An insightful and richly rendered collection of female-led short stories.