Ten Stories

Cumbo (Boarding Pass) offers up 10 shorts with broad appeal in this entertaining collection. In the opening story, a group of boys in the small town of Lawson, N.Y., are accessories to a bike theft and learn an important lesson when they confront the reclusive man from whom the bicycle was stolen. In "Thunderbird," a young boy learns life lessons when his troubled 18-year-old cousin comes to visit. While Cumbo's stories are tender and well crafted, some of them lack depth. "Park Avenue" describes a young man's new job at a stock brokerage firm in New York. The story's characters reflect the elitism and materialism of the world of high finance, but they fail to reflect the moral ambiguity many readers will expect from the denizens of Wall Street. While these emotive tales often lack the kind of gut-wrenching or heartwarming denouements that would make them stick with readers, they ably capture everyday life and the unexpected lessons that come from self-discovery.