Personal strength and resiliency are recurrent themes in Köenings’s surprising and inventive collection (after the novel The Blue Taxi
) of five longish stories. They focus largely on relationships and loss, beginning with “Pearls to Swine,” about a narrow-minded wealthy woman whose vision of herself as a magnanimous host is threatened when the invitation she extends to two young women has unforeseen consequences. Expectations are equally disrupted in the title story, which tracks the parallel mishaps that befall a naïve female tourist in Africa and a bus ticket boy, Ezra. Assistance comes from the beyond in “Wondrous Strange,” when at a séance a woman receives instructions from an African spirit regarding a ritual she might perform to revive her ailing husband, and by extension, her own sense of competency. Köenings’s writing is dense but focused, and she often suggests the endings of her stories early on, allowing the reader to focus on the characters’ reactions, thoughts and emotions. The collection’s richness and complexity prove Köenings to be a skillful and imaginative storyteller. (Mar.)
