cover image Where Love Leaves Us

Where Love Leaves Us

Renee Manfredi. University of Iowa Press, $20 (144pp) ISBN 978-0-87745-444-1

The finest of these observant, lyrical stories by Manfredi, co-winner of the 1993 Iowa Short Fiction Award, center on father/daughter bonds ranging from tender to risky as both parties struggle to deal with the daughter's nascent womanhood. Relationships with mothers, living or dead, are usually peripheral; dates with boys are meaningful chiefly as they plug into the Italian-American family drama. In ``The Projectionist,'' a sagacious and complex tale, 15-year-old Serafina fitfully penetrates the inner life of her father, a sleepwalker and movie-house employee who mourns his Italian first wife. Caitie and her childlike Dad are ``Truants'' who routinely play hooky from school and work while harried Mom slaves at a law firm until events take an unexpected final twist. ``Tall Pittsburgh'' shows a doting restaurant owner grooming his ravishing, balky daughter, whose peerless mother died at 27, to be a beauty queen. Love for a dead father haunts ``The Mathematics of Pendulums'' and the potent title story; in the latter, Lena gives a home perm to her widowed Mom (who wants to charm a new lover) and arrives at a messy epiphany. Five of the nine eloquent tales have appeared in literary journals. (Jan.)