Historical February–March 2012 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Short story writer Margaret Hermes’s lively and humorous style gives a reader something to enjoy and admire on every page. Relative Strangers is a theme that surfaces throughout the fourteen stories in this collection.
In the title story, relatives are shocked by revelations about the buried pasts of family members.
In ”Transubstantiation,” a long-wed couple discover they are strangers to each other. “The River’s Daughter,” explores the uneasy relationship between siblings: “Even though I came first, once Carrie was on the scene I never came first to mind.
I bore the distinction of being both the oldest and an afterthought.” With effort, they’ve managed not to let men come between them, but the river of the title threatens to permanently separate the sisters. Sometimes the connection, or misconnection, is cross-generational, as in “For the Home Team,” where a boy is sent away to his uncle’s farm during the breakup of his parents’ marriage.
When Daniel bemoans his father’s absence and silence over the course of the difficult summer, his uncle replies, “Sure, sure.
He is stupid.
I mean no disrespect. Men are stupid is all.
They don’t know how to act.” Daniel tells us, “I was glad to find that we two were somehow excluded from this society of morons.” Hermes draws us in with stories that seem familiar but never ordinary.
Some are set in St. Louis, while others take place on a South Carolina farm, in a hospital in Duluth, at a baseball game at the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, in a mythical town in the Missouri Bootheel, or in a nameless village in Eastern Europe where “everything was heavy — the coats, the shoes, the sky, the hearts.” Her versatility is reflected not only in the settings but in the array of characters, ranging from a Methodist shoe saleswoman to a young Catholic proprietor of a consignment shop to a Jewish adolescent who builds a tree house retreat. Relative Strangers was chosen by celebrated short story writer Jill McCorkle as winner of the 2011 Doris Bakwin Award.
In the words of contest judge McCorkle, “Margaret Hermes is a wonderful writer and this is a moving and powerful collection.” Relative Strangers, short stories by Margaret Hermes, Carolina Wren Press, $15.95.
Also available as an e-book. Scheduled readings, free and open to the public: Sunday, February 12 at CWE Left Bank Books, 4:00 pm., University City Public Library,Thursday, March 29 7:00 p.m.
Original photograph caption
Relative Strangers book cover. Designer not separately credited.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, February–March 2012.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2012_02.pdf, printed page(s) 7; PDF page(s) 7.
