RESONANT BLUE

White’s short stories observe everyday people at turning points in their lives.

The pieces that make up this collection provide revealing looks into the lives of their characters and quickly establish a sense of immediacy. In the title story, a high-powered architect fails to recognize signs in his own home indicating his relationship is failing (“She had ways of hiding things she didn’t want him to know about”). In “Cadmium,” a young man attending his mother’s second wedding learns to recognize her as a person separate from his relationship to her, and they begin to mend the damage she did to their relationship when he came out. In “Smoke,” a woman reckons with the remnants of her abusive marriage as her life literally burns around her. In the closing story, “What You Know,” an aspiring writer can’t seem to write his way past his parents’ tragic deaths. While the narratives in the stories are disparate, the overall theme of growth amid turmoil unites the collection. The writing is compelling and personal, quickly drawing readers into each entry with robust, fully fleshed-out characters. Although intriguing, “The Love of Your Life Show,” which follows a woman on a dating game show, feels out of sync with the other stories—the slightly off-kilter, alternate-reality feeling of this story doesn’t mesh with the quotidian yet profound nature of the rest of the collection. Most of the stories are well-paced, although “Par Avion,” in which an older woman takes off for Greece without telling her children, could have imparted the same message more succinctly. The stories flow neatly into each other, with the intimate atmosphere providing an underlying commonality to the otherwise unconnected characters. Similarly, each narrative builds to a crossroads—some dramatic and some much more muted—and provides an effective hook to grab the reader’s attention.

A quiet but captivating collection of stories with an affecting view of the commonplace.