Briefly Noted Book Reviews

This incisive, warm-blooded collection of stories is populated by outsiders: expatriates and repatriates, Vikings, travelling ventriloquists. Nearly half the stories are linked, tracing a romance between Jack and Sadie, whom we first meet in Ireland, attending Jack's sister's wedding to a Dutchman. Whether it's over the course of a honeymoon in Amsterdam or a day at a Texas water park, McCracken illuminates qualities of human nature through fragments of her characters' lives, much like the boy in the title story, examining ancient shards of pottery at a museum: "Looking at a piece of a thing, he might think, deduce, discover something nobody ever had, which was all he wanted in the world." An eccentric Italian bibliophile, Giordano Vietri, is the driving force of this assured début novel. The narrator, Gabriele, working in a Berkeley bookstore, receives hundreds of Vietri's requests for obscure titles, and, as she ships them off to him, at an address in Rome, she wonders if he is an academic or someone on a more personal quest for knowledge.