Scenic Route: A Collection of Essays and Short Stories

Abstract

In these six intertwined short stories and essays, the narrators’ conflicts have ways of cropping up in unexpected places. In “Prank,” a teenage boy joins his friends in the woods for a joke that turns sour. His sister looks back on this same rural town and takes us on a tour of its dark side, ending at a place she wished she hadn’t found in “Tour of a Small Town.” In “Private Beach,” the narrator takes her two young children to a secluded oasis, and while trying to shield them from danger, brings them straight to it. This same mother reminisces about her days working shade tobacco in “Seasonal Work.” In “The Woman Who Lives by the Sun,” she struggles to find balance as she ponders the view from her window on her daily commute. And in the last story, “Beautiful Things,” the narrator re-examines a ghostly encounter in her rural hometown and realizes its significance to her own dealings with death. The off-the-beaten-path physical settings in each story, and the way the characters move through them, provide the backdrop for each protagonist to work through—or fall further into—their conflicts.