Come to Me

A first collection of short stories features tales of psychiatrists crossing professional boundaries, a small girl in need of love, a frightened father in need of redemption, and wives who become mistresses.

Bloom's remarkably consistent first collection of stories includes her award-winning "Silver Water," a sad remembrance of a mentally ill sister and the family that loves yet cannot help her. The story includes elements common to Bloom's work: female protagonists whose lives are changed through psychological trauma, often involving therapists or people embarked on therapy. This makes sense, since Bloom herself is a practicing therapist. She deftly explores the complexity of the therapist-patient relationship ("Song of Solomon" and the aptly titled, ironic "Psychoanalysis Changed My Life"); the subtle brutality of troubled families ("Love Is Not a Pie," "Sleepwalking," "When the Year Grows Old"); and the strange compromises struck by couples to maintain tenuous emotional connections ("Sleepwalking"). Taken together, however, Bloom's insights into human love and obsession tend to blur into a long and rather uniform psychoanalytic lesson, undercut occasionally by revelations. She's at her best in showing how people really think, as in a description of a self-effacing housewife's distracted thoughts during sex in "The Sight of You," or in the title story, in which Bloom achieves a soaring complexity in characters whose strange behavior eludes any simple psychological explanation.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Practicing psychotherapist Bloom has written 12 powerful short stories in a debut collection that abounds in psychological insights. Deviant human behavior is portrayed compassionately and honestly. In the story "Love Is Not a Pie," a young girl learns the meaning of love when she witnesses her mother and father's involvement with another man in a menage a trois. In "Only You," a woman who is obsessed with her hairdresser finds out that he delights in dressing up in her clothing. "Silver Water" depicts a family who must cope with the illness of their schizophrenic daughter. "Sleepwalking" portrays a moment of incest between a mother and stepson who comfort each other during a time of grief. Many of the stories feature the same characters and show the same family from different points of view and at different points in time. Recommended for public libraries.
- Stephanie Furtsch, New Rochelle P.L., N.Y.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.