Ripple Effects: And Other Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781952232992)

In eleven carefully crafted stories, Lesley Mahoney O'Connell's landscapes and seascapes help readers to recognize and to feel the strengths, flaws, and compromises her characters are developing as they navigate their life choices. Most of the stories are set in New England coastal villages. All are sensitive and thought-provoking, the characters relatable and real.

Ripple Effects features mostly quiet but intelligent characters who see themselves as outsiders in their own worlds. O'Connell lets readers listen as they work their way toward decisions they can somehow live with. Some swim through currents of parental self-centeredness; others, lacking ordinary filters, dream impossible dreams as they ignore career crises and marital ennui. O'Connell is especially good at exploring the interior lives, the caves and cliffs carved by deep losses, creating empathy and often a sense of peace in readers.

In the first story, for example, a young teacher grapples with the strain of being permanent guardian for her neurodivergent younger brother. In the second, a teenage girl trying to escape heavy pressures at home is drawn to shoplifting, and to risky quarry jumping. Another follows a new mother struggling to bond with her baby in an isolated seaside home with a mostly-absent husband. Deception and self-deception blend and ripple when a grieving widower relives moments from his childhood and wonders what sort of future is possible. Memories clash with present moments when a young wife travels from California to sell her family's New England home, the one she'd persuaded her parents to leave behind.

O'Connell's stories are connected by nuanced water motifs, and explore the dynamics of both ripples and riptides. Several feature empowered women, or women on the road to empowerment. At their core, most of these stories hint at the strength and hope which can arise in disheartening circumstances.