Farewell Navigator: Stories

Zumas gives socially awkward, mysteriously gifted and self-destructive outcasts spellbinding, unflinching voice in her debut collection. The heroes in this collection are trapped; some are resigned to years of caregiving, many are institutionalized and nearly all haunt the fringes of normalcy (or disregard the normal altogether). Each story begins with a lightning strike into a new consciousness: the first flashes of a romance over the lunch line in a psych ward in “Waste No Time if This Method Fails”; a teenager in the title story dreaming of abandoning his blind parents; the young woman of “The Everything Hater” living in sustained dread after her brother’s repeated suicide attempts. There are triumphs, too: a patient in treatment for an eating disorder exacts revenge on a bully, and an underage groupie liberates herself from her punk lover’s fabricated fairy tale world. Zumas captures halfway-house heartbreak as well as moments of thoughtful, scab-picking solitude. It’s a powerful, irresistible collection. (June)