Small Craft Warnings: Stories

The lives of women on the edge and beyond the margins have seldom been explored with as much power or insight as in these stories by Kate Braverman. In a world without succor, Braverman's characters grope for meaning and solutions to their dilemmas. "Our Lady of the 43 Sorrows" must meet the bizarre needs of her severely brain-damaged mother as her own career as a soap-opera actress declines. The precocious, awkward adolescent narrator of the title story watches as her elegant grandmother confronts the illness that will soon end the colorful life she has enjoyed so avidly. Abandonment, in these wrenching stories, comes in many forms, and freedom is elusive and sometimes fraught with pain and terror.