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There is no defining moment for Brown that signals the end of youth.  Instead there are a series of events that lead the narrator into adulthood.  The new perspective, literally, that comes with her eye going from crooked to straight in “Learning To See”. Speaking her mind to develop a more honest relationship with her father in “Fish”.  Learning about life from the short-haired summer camp swimming counselor in “Nancy Booth, Wherever You Are”.  The narrator faces the eventual death of loved ones in “Smokers” and the impermanence of her own life when she comes close to drowning in “An Element”. 

Brown writes with a voice that is direct while visually descriptive.  At times I felt as if we were sitting side by side on her couch looking through her old family photos, her recounting vivid stories to me triggered by the familiar images.  Parts of these stories feel like they could be your own, but it’s the unique details that keep them in the realm of the imagined.

As the stories go on, the narrators voice changes with the weight of experience.  A view of the world that was once “uneven, blurred and glistening, oddly beautiful…the world where what is seems enough…” becomes a world of painfully clear realities. 

I was especially taken by the narrators’ memories of her mother.  The second story, “Learning to See” talks of a mother helping her daughter to see more of the outside world by correcting her crooked right eye through daily exercises.  The child cherishes these times, not because her vision is getting better but because it is a special time with her mother.  As the stories progress we see the gradual reversing of roles, the daughter who was once needing her mothers comfort because of a fear of the dark, as she gets older, wakes her mother from nightmares.  In “Breath” and “My Mothers Body” Brown describes the pain and love in caring for and letting go of her mother. 

In the last three stories the narrator makes the final steps away from youth. In “Description of a Struggle” the narrator wrestles with the heaviness of grief, the realization that she is no longer young, coming to understand that she has learned to not have hope.  She is discovering who she is through memories of her past and of her parents. These last images are of a more inward nature, written with an awareness that comes with experience, an insightful understanding of the multiple ways we are impacted by events and the contradictory nature of our inner worlds.

This collection of linked stories seems ordered chronologically. The story “Heaven” acts as a link between the beginning of remembering, and the end.  The cyclical structure of this book is not unlike the way we circle around our own memories. Stories repeating over in our heads until the nostalgia becomes overwhelming. The memories of people gone, of important events, of how we were and used to see the world.  We get stuck inside ourselves, like the narrator does in the last few stories, in memories of our pasts, and “Heaven” brings us back to a place where we can begin again.