cover image The Marvelous Secrets: Stories by Marian Coe

The Marvelous Secrets: Stories by Marian Coe

Marian Coe. Southlore Press, $16.95 (232pp) ISBN 978-0-9633341-8-3

Southern women navigate situations in flux in Coe's 13 gentle stories about choice and chance. From the Saved Treasures Shop in Green Mountain Gap, N.C., to Luigi's Italian restaurant in Roanoke, Va., housewives, mothers, working women and retirees grow older gracefully without giving up their simple dreams. In the title story, Marta Treadwell discovers that her dull, perfectionist husband, Norton, is having an affair with the 40-year-old divorc e down the street. A car accident totals Norton's '56 restored T-Bird and sends Norton to the V.A. Hospital to recuperate for three months, presenting Marta with an unexpected opportunity for escape. Marta's story invokes themes appearing throughout the book: the ingenious revenge of quiet women and the struggle of individuals to control their fates. In most of these tales, fate and choice enjoy a serendipitous synergy. In ""Waiting at the Matterhorn,"" a couple's European tour signals the end of a marriage but the start of a new life. ""All the Time There Is"" poignantly reminds vacationing couples to savor their moments of freedom. In ""Concessions,"" a glaucoma patient retreats from the fussing of her caretaker sister into pleasurable half-dreams. Coe's wistful optimism is embodied in ""Moon Lady""'s Molly McFee, the eccentric neighbor who befriends a single mother adrift in their Florida trailer park. Coe sees hope in small acts of defiance: protecting overgrown shrubbery, saving buildings along a ""Blamed Highway,"" standing up for a neglectful grown-up daughter. Three poems, selections from Coe's two novels (Eve's Mountain; Legacy) and black-and-white illustrations complete the volume. Published by South Lore Press, which was established to promote the kind of books you'd expect to find in the quaint bookstores, antique shops and tearooms that dot Coe's stories, this is an unassuming work of comfortable prose. (July)