cover image Gifts and Other Stories

Gifts and Other Stories

Charlotte Holmes. Confluence Press, $15 (176pp) ISBN 978-1-881090-04-5

Ambitious and imagistic, Holmes's first collection of 11 short stories runs the gamut of era, gender and class in their portrayal of loss, ambivalence and detachment. Each of her 11 minimalistic slices of life are surprisingly rich in detail: she is able to immediately place the reader at the feet of a lonely child, within the drunken stupor of an alcoholic, into the edgy thoughts of a young man and his seemingly reticent stepfather. But while Holmes gives her characters painstakingly reconstructed pasts, they never seem to be much shaped by them, the result being that the characters are generally flat and unconvincing. Their saving grace is a sense of longing, one not always easily defined by either characters or readers, but they still lack the complexity that would make them memorable and empathetic. In her last story, ``Migrations,'' the narrator speaks of his love while watching a whale swim back to sea: ``her voice in my ear was the wind over an enormous distance.'' Holmes's stories are not all that different--her voice is intriguing but emotionally remote. (Apr.)