Survival Skills: Stories (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781618220219)

Jean Ryan's debut collection tells stories of nature and of human nature. The characters who inhabit Jean Ryan's graceful, imaginative collection of stories are survivors of accidents and acts of nature, of injuries both physical and emotional. Ryan writes of beauty and aging, of love won and lost-with characters enveloped in the mysteries of the natural world and the animal kingdom. In "Greyhound," a woman brings home a rescued dog for her troubled partner in hopes that they might heal one another-while the dog in "What Gretel Knows" is the keeper of her owner's deepest secrets. In "Migration," a recently divorced woman retreats to a lakefront cabin where she is befriended by a mysterious Canada goose just as autumn begins to turn to winter. As a tornado ravages three towns in "The Spider in the Sink," a storm chaser's wife spares the life of a spider as she anxiously waits for her husband to return. And in "A Sea Change," a relationship falls victim to a woman's obsession with the world below the waves. The world is at once a beautiful and perilous place, Jean Ryan's stories tell us, and our lives are defined by the shelters we build.

Author: Jean Ryan
ISBN-10: 1618220217
ISBN-13: 9781618220219
Publisher: Ashland Creek Press
Language: English
Published: 04/01/2013
Pages: 212
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.54lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.25w x 0.48d
Award: Lambda Literary Awards - Finalist

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/22/2013