Thunderstruck & Other Stories
Twenty years after her first collection of stories (Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry!, 1993), McCracken returns to short fiction with this collection of nine marvelously quirky, ironic, but, most of all, poignant stories. A young woman befriends a lonely, eccentric children’s librarian, who is then devastated when the young woman is found murdered. An English couple who moved to France deed their house to the husband’s son from his first marriage, and he later sells it out from under them, leaving them essentially homeless. A woman cares for her granddaughter in Iowa while her son, the girl’s father, is dying in a Boston hospital, and neither is able to say goodbye. A woman who lives with her aging father and teenage son disappears into thin air, leaving her son reduced to stealing frozen pizzas from the corner market. Though her characters may seem strange, McCracken paints them with such rich detail that it feels as if we must know them, after all—so immersed in their lives do we become in just a few pages. --Deborah Donovan