Booklist Review

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This review was published in the August 1997 edition of Booklist. The review was written by Donna Seaman.

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Gallagher’s newest short stories – all set in the Northwest and featuring a robust cast of distinctive characters, from chatty hair dressers to thoughtful loggers – possess the precision of poetry and the drama of good screenplays, which comes as no surprise given her adeptness as a poet and her experience cowriting screenplays with Raymond Carver, her late husband. Each tale is notable for the purity of its narrative voice, concreteness of detail, potent evocation of place, and smooth acceleration from the utterly ordinary to the bewilderingly extraordinary. Take "The Leper," for example. A woman is talking to a neurotic artist friend on the phone (much to her husband’s annoyance), and rolling out a ple dough, when men begin delivering flowers for a funeral she knows nothing about. Then she looks out the window and (impossibly, mysteriously) sees a herd of horses swimming out to a nearby island. Gallagher turns this series of striking non sequitirs into a fable of resonant emotional truth, a feat she performs to perfection in each gleaming and redeeming story.

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