An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories

Rating:
Summary: (3.5) Stunning moments of clarity
Review: Hood is a consummate writer whose words and images create believable scenes of humanity played out in a variety of relationships. From the strange attraction of opposites to the complicated elements of friendship, Hood speaks with elegant precision, her description of place almost tactile. The stories cover all generations and experiences, as the characters struggle with issues that require courage and not a little resilience, each culminating in a moment of irrevocable truth.

Hood maintains a delicate balance in this impressive collection, selections that illustrate the disparate concerns of everyday lives. Without rendering judgment, each slice-of-life tale reveals real people with complex emotions, navigating through lives fraught with endless decisions; this series renders the commonplace extraordinary, suggesting the inherent danger in choices, given the inevitable consequences and those perfect moments of clarity that strike without warning.

I like the people in these stories, particularly the women, with their common yearning, their angst, in spite of a lack of safety in a constantly changing world. Most characters are relatively young and single, but the married ones juggle the usual concerns of family vs. self and the elderly the burden of too much familiarity with grief. All of them are processing emotions, losses, fears and the unreliability of dreams; in one particularly striking story, the perfect life is shattered by an action that will taint the future of those left in the wake of destruction.

As the title intimates, the author is indeed an observer of behavior, in this case the human variety. Skillfully, the author arranges her protagonists so that they are illuminated, exposing the fragile undersides they try vainly to protect. The inevitable predator, reality, moves closer, the nest breeched and innocence flown, leaving only remnants of a comfort forever relinquished. Luan Gaines/2004.