“No more having to run out to the barn to sleep. Nobody can hurt us in the city, OK, boys? We’re going to have a life that will be so boring, every day it will be the same, and it is going to be wonderful. OK?”

Michelle takes charge of her and her family’s fate amidst her, her brothers, and her mom’s escape from Michelle’s abusive father. Here, Michelle sits in the driver’s seat and tells her family a happy, hopeful story about their future. The narrative she concocts is a form of survival, her way of Discovering Grace in a Violent World, one of the collection’s main themes.

“She was far from being the first to find it blowing through her, and of course I will not be the last. I look around and can see it in so many other women, passed down from a time beyond history, this wind that is dark and ceaseless and raging within.”

The first-person narrator of wind likens her mom’s lifelong sadness to a dark wind. This metaphor reifies her mother’s ongoing internal distress. This moment from the end of the short story also widens Michelle’s story from the particular and the familial to the universal. Michelle’s story doesn’t simply belong to Michelle, but to all women—it evidences the effects of generational and gendered trauma.

“Tonight, she was desolate in her bed once more, fifty years old, freshly retired; there would be no children, and the house was at last finished. What she wouldn’t give to be in a tight crawl space, sprinkled with squirrel turds, running wire. The profound pleasure of figuring things out, then doing them.”

In “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” Eliza’s physical state—lying “desolate in her bed”—offers an organic narrative throughway into her internal world. She is not actively doing anything and her mind is free to roam over life, both actual and imagined. Here, Eliza is comparing her current circumstances to the circumstances she would want. Her situation contrasts with her longings, conveying the theme of The Conflict Between Personal Desire and Moral Responsibility.

“She was startled out of her reverie—a strange erotic daydream, flesh without body, warmth without a face. Willie couldn’t see inside her head, she told herself; besides, daydreaming hurt nobody.”

In this scene from “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” Eliza tries to justify her daydreams as a way to justify her own longings. She asserts that although she is fantasizing about having sex with Bet, this fantasy cannot actually cause her husband—who is by her side—any harm. The passage reiterates The Conflict Between Personal Desire and Moral Responsibility. Eliza knows it is morally wrong to have an affair but does not consider her “strange erotic daydream” a betrayal.

“Oh, but she hadn’t wanted to leave him, not really, had she. She had just wanted to know what it was like to brush up against the dazzling future again. She felt the part of her that the lush spring had stirred to life go dormant, deep in her, once more. She knew that it would not awaken again in her lifetime.”

At the end of Eliza’s story, Eliza chooses to silence her own longings for the sake of her husband, Willie. The passage reiterates the theme of Care as an Act of Love and an Emotional Burden. Eliza actively dismisses her impulses for personal and sexual freedom—telling herself she wasn’t serious about leaving Willie—and wraps her body around her husband in a protective stance. She lets her true wildness “go dormant” for the sake of Willie’s peace of mind. She loves him, but this love requires her to sacrifice her contentment.

“All the people you can trust already have their own cars and wouldn’t be caught dead in a bus. Someday, she said dreamily, she was going to buy herself a great big car, pearly colored, with leather so soft inside you’d think you were riding along in a cool white bed.”

In “To Sunland,” Joanie muses on different forms of transportation in her conversation with her brother Buddy. She associates cars with trustworthiness, freedom, and money, while she associates buses with untrustworthiness, entrapment, and financial strain. She imagines buying a car because she is imagining an independent life for herself. At the same time, the passage foreshadows how the lady with the birds will prove untrustworthy and steal Joanie’s money.

“Well, to tell the truth, I’m mighty envious of you going off to college. I would have loved to learn about the old books and philosophers and such. Though I say, I always do say, a woman’s place is in the home. She said this with such vehemence, her chins wobbled.”

On the bus to Gainesville, the woman with the birds lectures Joanie on her life choices and accuses her of betraying her social responsibilities. Although admittedly “envious” of Joanie “going off to college,” the woman underscores her belief that Joanie really belongs in a domestic sphere—taking care of her brother and keeping house. These lines of dialogue reiterate the theme of The Conflict Between Personal Desire and Moral Responsibility, which Joanie wrestles with throughout the story.

“Then she said soft and fast to herself, Oh, my god, what am I doing? What am I doing? Mama always said she had me to take care of you in case something happened to her, and look what I’m doing.”

Just as she is about to leave Buddy at Sunland, Joanie experiences a moment of self-doubt which momentarily augments the narrative tension. She feels guilty for “abandoning” her brother and is questioning her decision to act in her own interest—making it seem as if she might change her mind and give up her plans. At the same time, the passage reiterates the emotional entrapment Joanie has felt throughout her life, born just to care for Buddy. The passage reiterates the theme of Care as an Act of Love and an Emotional Burden.

“Her mother drank nothing but vodka now; it killed the germs, she said. She no longer trusted water, certainly not tap, which had lead and fluoride and bacteria in it, but not bottled, either; who knew where bottled water came from? All she ate were her pills and sometimes a Popsicle, but only mango. Mango, she said, is the cleanest kind of fruit.”

In “Brawler,” the third-person narrator is limited to the protagonist Sara Brawler’s perspective, inhabiting her consciousness to describe the narrative world through her eyes. In this moment, Sara studies her sleeping mother on the couch. This moment of quiet creates an organic opportunity for Sara to reflect on her mother’s mental health condition and how it has escalated in recent days—key background details to Sara’s story.

“She held her breath and heard only the air conditioner, the narrator, her own heart in her ears. And then all at once she felt it, a slippage, a slickness, and even though it wasn’t taking place within her own body, she could see the slow and uncontrollable dilation downward and outward, into a vast sun-bright plain full of golden grasses […] and a horizon that didn’t stop in the vagueness […] but pressed in into the palest and most fragmented of blues.”

The third-person narrator’s use of descriptive language enacts the claustrophobic nature of Sara’s circumstances. Language including “slippage,” “slickness,” “slow,” “dilation,” and “downward” conveys Sara’s powerlessness over her own circumstances. She cannot stop what is happening to her mother, and to her by proxy. The subsequent images of the “sun,” “plain,” “grasses,” and “horizon” conjure a contrasting atmosphere of freedom and hope. Sara longs to enter a realm like the one she sees on the animal documentary, where creatures can roam freely under a blue sky.

“And she was about to go into the whole story—the delicious old winterized camp […] and its crisp white modern interior, the husband and wife like sleek seals, the toddler she loved like her own child, who slept with his hands curled near his ears—when she saw the other three exchanging looks and repressing their smiles, and that old whip of their judgment snapped out of the darkness of time and stung her.”

In the short story “Birdie,” Nic’s experience at the hospital with her middle-school friends conveys her ostracization from the group. Nic is trying to relate to Birdie, Melodie, and Sammie in a genuine way—ready to open up to them and share “the whole story” about the summer she graduated high school. However, she never gets to tell this story because the “whip of [her friends’] judgment” interrupts her and causes her to shut down. The passage establishes a power dynamic between the friends that has pervaded their entire relationship.

“It was as if she were two people: the almost-eighteen-year-old misfit ready to leave this tiny place yet frightened of the world, and at the same time her future self, living her own ideal life, in this quiet and peace with her child and her beautiful things all around her.”

When Nic returns to the hospital and tells Birdie the whole story of the summer she was 17, she allows herself to delve into the atmospheric, sensory, and emotional details of her experience. Her feeling that she was two people while babysitting that summer—the one in the past and the one in the future—captures her lifelong internal conflict between who she feels others want her to be and who she believes herself capable of being.

“He would lie here suspended beyond the tense hot afternoon and into the dusk with fireflies, he would lie here into the night […] It would be a good life, this life of newt. He would be held up by the dark brown water that lapped at him, that asked nothing at all of him.”

In the opening scene of “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” the narrator depicts Chip in a state of blissful passivity. Floating on his back in his grandparents’ pond, he imagines himself living forever as a newt. The image foreshadows Chip’s lifelong inability to exercise his agency—forever drifting through life, taking no responsibility for himself or others, and making no decisions based on his own moral code. The pond is a metaphor for the privilege he was born into.

“College was all new until the second week. Chip moved himself shyly through the days, and then it was simply prep school all over again in a different place. Same old faces, same old parties, same beer pong and midnight pizza, ecstasy and blow and Adderall and pot, someone’s dad’s box at the Celtics, someone’s house on the Cape.”

The structure and tone of this passage enact Chip’s ongoing passivity and apathy towards life. Only two weeks into college, he feels as if he is repeating the patterns of prep school. Each phase of his life becomes indecipherable from the next, defined by frivolity, hedonism, and favors from friends. The narrator presents the passage as a list, which creates a rapid narrative pacing that enacts Chip’s lack of intentionality.

“No. You’re not an idiot, but I think you were born lucky. And sometimes luck is a bad thing because you never had to find out what it was you were good at or loved to do. And now you’re going to have a lot of time alone to ask yourself these questions.”

When Libby comes to Chip’s rescue after he loses his job at their uncle’s firm, she tries to offer him a chance at Discovering Grace in a Violent World and urges him towards a new path. She casts his privileged circumstances as “good luck,” while also asserting that Chip has failed to pursue his own self-discovery. The passage underscores the dangers of privilege, and how wealth and power might preclude an individual from living an ethical, purposeful life.

“She was so much older than he was, she had a huge butt, she was not beautiful, not at all, she was blunt, his sister used her name as a slur, what in the world did he think he was doing. […] But […] a slice of tiramisu dusted with cocoa was set before him, and with the first taste he knew it was no use, that nothing he would tell himself could stop what he wanted to happen from happening.”

In this passage from “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” the third-person narrator inhabits Chip’s consciousness and describes Pearl Spang via his lens. Chip’s internal monologue while sitting at the restaurant watching Pearl is judgmental, disparaging, condescending, and unforgiving. Despite Chip’s overt distaste for Pearl, he feels powerless not to have sex with her—a notion which underscores Chip’s moral deficiencies and lacking character. He sees Pearl as a minor character—even a prop—in his own story and thinks little of what their encounter means for her.

“He thought of the boathouse shining unadmired on the large pond, the way he was working fourteen hours a day to make the cabin a sleek, white-washed little jewel, how he had planned the whole next week to the minute so that he could […] show his family how good he was at this kind of work. How carpentry soothed him, how he’d found in the neat angles and precise measurements something of a redemption.”

Here, Chip’s internal monologue reveals his desperation to prove himself to his family via his recent accomplishments on the property. For the first time in his life, Chip feels that he has found something that he is good at, and convinces himself that renovating the boathouse is proof of his purposefulness. Without his family there to admire the work, Chip struggles to take pride in his alleged “redemption,” underscoring the instability of his transformation.

“How strange the house was in the night, he thought, looking around. It smelled the same, of dried herbs and Pearl, it was warm as ever, but without the woman in it, the house was just a house.”

When Chip breaks into Pearl’s house, he discovers that it is not the house he has been drawn to all along, but Pearl herself. Pearl’s home is a sacred space—a realm she has carved out for herself amidst her otherwise difficult world. The house represents her version of Discovering Grace in a Violent World. Chip is intruding upon this sacred space.

“Then Pearl let the quiet of her house seep into her and fortify the most precious quiet at the very center of her. She had not had an easy life; there had been early terror, pain, terrible heartbreaks one after the other, years of ugliness, when everyone thought she was lost. But all that was in the past.”

The image of Pearl sitting alone in her home and enjoying the fire she built and the quiet of her home underscores her self-possession. While Pearl knows that she needs people, she also knows herself well enough to understand that “the quiet of her house” is essential to her survival. Her home is her refuge, a shelter from the “ugliness” she endured in her past.

“The woman let the girl’s delicate wrist go and even in the dark saw the bruises already pooling under the skin. She brushed the muddy hair from the girl’s face. All sleeping children are as alike as siblings, unformed, soft in the cheek.”

In “Under the Wave,” the woman’s observations of the sleeping child while at the refugee shelter foreshadow her decision to take the child. She privately notices that the child resembles any other child while she is sleeping—the reference to siblings portends her decision to bring the child home, to call her by her late son’s name, and to treat her as if she were her late son.

“The child watched the woman fold into herself and begin to weep. She crouched, pulling the child to her, and whispered that the child mustn’t ever do it again. Never. Never. Never risk your life for anything. It is too precious.”

When the child almost runs out into the street and gets hit by a bus, the woman has a panic attack because she is terrified of repeating her loss. The moment underscores Care as an Act of Love and an Emotional Burden. The woman is so devoted to caring for the girl because she feels that she failed to care for—protect and save—her son. Her love is a heavy burden she carries, which she in turn asks the child to carry, too.

“Don’t worry, we’ll figure everything out, little sis, Gus said, and picked her up. Aura pressed her face into her neck and inhaled her marvelous smell, like apples and pine trees and the kind of candies that looked like colored glass. That was when something in her began to burn. The days became bright and smooth.”

In “Such Small Islands,” this intimate scene between Aura and Gus underscores Aura’s longing for love. Although initially wary of spending the summer under her half-sister’s care, Aura becomes attached to Gus: Her days become “bright and smooth,” which implies that her connection with and trust in Gus grants her peace of mind. This is why Aura becomes so upset when Gus seems to betray her: She wants Gus to attend to her needs the way her mother cannot.

“I took my toiletries, Moby-Dick from the box of books, a sleeping bag, a pillow, a hiking backpack full of clothes, and slipped out, leaving everything else behind. I didn’t say goodbye. I told no one where I was going. I didn’t know until I was outside in the softly setting New England sun that I was turning toward the West.”

In “Annunciation,” the unnamed first-person narrator’s decision to leave her life in New England and head West conveys her longing for freedom. The narrator is desperate to make a new life for herself, particularly beyond her claustrophobic family structure—and does so via this violent severance. The passage conveys the narrator’s willingness to make relational sacrifices as she seeks self-discovery and autonomy, while also reflecting The Conflict Between Personal Desires and Moral Responsibility.