Within the eight interconnected stories that make up Sari Rosenblatt's perceptive debut collection, Father Guards the Sheep, ordinary people search for a sense of belonging. In the opening "Daughter of Retail," Ellen, a girl filled with self-doubt, becomes a reluctant employee at her father's business. She realizes that surviving necessitates a certain type of invisibility: "leaving the shell behind and taking the head with you." "Miss McCool" demonstrates Rosenblatt's proficiency at weaving a common thread among stories. Ellen, now an adult, can't shake her insecurities. Although she's graduated college and lives on her own, she's still adrift: "If I dozed for a while then woke, my room seemed strange. I couldn't name things.... I didn't seem to belong to me."
The yearning for belonging continues in "The New Frontier." Joel, often ignored, and his distant father are driving home from school. He looks at "houses with lights on in every room" and their inhabitants, "looking like they belonged exactly where they were." In the title story, "Father Guards the Sheep," Esther, a grown woman who lives at home, firmly believes she belongs there. But when her mother suggests other living arrangements, Esther thinks, with a wry comment, "my mother started interfering with the experience of being with my mother," and tells a desperate lie with deep repercussions.
Rosenblatt's unclouded and often gently humorous prose, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, succeeds in showing how profound inner lives can be. Fans of big-hearted stories will savor this collection. --Cindy Pauldine, bookseller, the river's end bookstore, Oswego, N.Y.