This story collection by National Endowment for the Arts Award recipient Hester Kaplan is filled with wonderful gems that are small marvels of pacing realized through plot-intensive narratives and memorable characters. Like every great short-story writer, Kaplan has mastered the art of making every word or gesture count. Her stories illuminate the fickle human heart and its often-meandering loyalties. Her characters lead messy, contradictory lives, moving from hatred to love and from indifference to need in the space of a few pages.
In "The Aerialist" a man who has lost his way in life and love returns to his former dentist for care and advice, affecting both the dentist and her acrobatic daughter far beyond the chance encounter. In "This Is Your Last Swim," Kaplan imagines the end of the world through the eyes of two private-school employees. As they walk the deserted, memory-haunted school grounds, their raw and searing dialogue provides the perfect counterpoint to the world ending in a whimper.
Kaplan doesn't need such an extreme setting to achieve emotional truth and honesty. Her endings feel real, appropriate and surprising, but leave the reader feeling that no alternative was ever possible. Each story in Unravished offers minute lessons in the hard-won, subtle wisdom found in domestic squabbles and work-day monotony. Thoughtful and creatively fertile, the collection is filled with the minor, barely discernible epiphanies that make life bearable or clarify its trajectory at last. Kaplan deserves the widest audience for this enjoyable and near flawless collection. --Donald Powell, freelance writer