As Much As I Know

In a collection of stories set in small towns and nameless places, a young woman returns to her childhood home with her daughter, a lonely woman struggles with her incestuous past, and a little girl senses the deception and bravado on her mother's face

Five short stories, each of them fully dimensional and resonant, mark the debut of a talented writer. "If There's Anything You Want to Know" is a delicate story about a little girl who senses her mother's betrayals even as she is desperate to please her. A cameo appearance is made here as well by the characters of "Gone," a complex story about a mother, Sophie Topilsky, who runs a newspaper and candy store, and her teenage son. As Benny strives to become more independent, Sophie is haunted by echoes of her own incestuous upbringing. The book ends with the title story, an outstanding tale about a young woman's journey to the family and home she fled 10 years earlier as a pregnant teenager. Now with her nine-year-old daughter in tow, Jeannette has run out of options. "When I am not headed anywhere, just someplace that hasn't come to me yet, it's like waiting to grow hungry so I'll know what to eat," she realizes. Linking all the stories is the binding power of love between parents and children and the equally inescapable force of betrayal.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In Thames's first collection, the title story--the homecoming of a prodigal daughter, her own young daughter in tow (the product of a cousin's love)--has genuine lift to it, touching down very low in female degradation before reaching very high for believable family reconciliation. Strong waves of true emotion wash through it at the right intervals, making it ultimately stirring. Too bad, then, that so little here (and a five-story collection seems a handicap for even the strongest talent) is in the same league. Every one of these pieces has to do with a child's being either shut out of or cruelly shut in by family neglect, selfishness--and the tone is generally passive, muffled, set in amber. A mother beats out her daughter for a boy's affection in ``Lorna Mitchell's Vision''; in ``The Miracle,'' a drug-dealer's family is so exotic and pathological that it implodes; in ``Gone,'' a woman's grown retarded son leaves her to live on his own, dooming her to memories of incest and denial. A stylist of no great distinction (``I grip the top of the iron headboard, crushing the cool molded tubing into my palms until my skin burns and my fingers ache. Sobs like a churning sea roll inside me, choked back by the barbed edges in my fever-scarred throat...''), Thames must depend solely on feeling for her stories to succeed--but except for the title one, these pieces lack the progress of feeling-unfolding-in-time that allows a character more than a stunned victimhood. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Thames takes us into the secret worlds of families in her debut collection of short stories, offering an insider's view of five very different families whose intense and emotional private lives contrast sharply with their rather ordinary surroundings. Thames lets us see for ourselves how little Emma's questions reveal what she knows about her mother and Artie Rose; how Lorna Mitchell's decision not to move away from home exposes her mother as a rival; and how Jeannette's family reunion turns out to be a painful test of strength. More sinister power struggles dominate the familial landscapes in "Bone" and "The Miracle." In these stories, fear and violence reign unchecked with no regard for age or sex. Thames tells these tales poignantly, but without artifice or sentimentality. Her straightforward style, embellished only by hard truths, is powerfully moving and may catch the casual reader unawares. Recommended for all fiction collections.
- Janet W. Reit, Univ. of Vermont Lib., Burlington
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.