The Souvenir Museum: Stories

The 12 stories collected in Elizabeth McCracken's The Souvenir Museum are skillfully crafted miniatures that feature unfailingly ordinary characters whose lives she uses to illuminate truths about love, longing and the elusive search for connection.

Beginning with the collection's opener, "The Irish Wedding," five of these stories feature a character named Jack, originally Lenny (the reason for his name change is revealed in the story "A Splinter"). Jack is born to an English family living in the United States, the only family member born outside England, something that makes him "a sort of Englishman, sort of American," and a fact that seems to influence his identity fundamentally. Several of Jack's stories include his partner, Sadie, who "wanted love so badly the longing felt like organ failure," and says her name is short for "Sadness." Jack thinks of himself as someone who has a "cactus soul," one that "need[s] water, too, but it could wait."

But McCracken (BowlawayThunderstruck) isn't content to remain in one spot, and her stories feature exotic locales like an uninhabited island off the Scottish coast in "Proof," where a father and son embark on a puffin-watching expedition two months after the death of their wife and mother that's as much about father-son dynamics as it is about the hunt for rare birds.

The personal discoveries unearthed by characters like these may seem inconsequential, but they are anything but that. They're the stories of choices, turning points and epiphanies that are the stuff of life itself, and of indelible moments Elizabeth McCracken preserves in these unpretentious tales. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer

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