Can You Wave Bye Bye

Mesmerizing and funny, dark but exceedingly tender, these eight interlinked short stories, by the winner of Canada's Journey Prize for short fiction, explore the mother-child bond and the legacy of alienation, pain and constant speculation that haunts those who were given up for adoption at birth. ""It is not uncommon for adopted girls to give their own first baby up for adoption,"" says an adviser, coldly, in ""A Well-Imagined Life."" Gasco's characters search for their mothers, imagine them and grieve their losses, heightened in several stories by the powerful emotions that come with the births of their own infants, or in their potent, even caustic flights of fancy. One schoolgirl vividly imagines the convent her mother hid in to give birth, while another seven-year-old girl tells her mother, ""No matter how badly I need the money, I will never kill you."" Gasco's themes turn beautifully on her deft, assured and even playful use of the second-person narrative. In the title story, a woman who will give up her child struggles with her limited knowledge of a half-sister her mother relinquished for adoption. Her father explained that her mother was attacked. ""For a long time you could not imagine what he meant and thought only that to your mother life had always been a big surprise."" In a tale entitled ""The Third Person,"" Elle, who is afraid her baby is God, remembers her husband's secretary's remark: ""What kind of name is Elle? In French it's just the third person."" Gasco loves wordplay and uses it to humanize the sense of isolation her characters feel. A story about a child snatched from her adoptive parents by her biological father, a man frantic with a sense of injustice and almost unhinged by his empathy for animals, is a chilling and painful complement to the other narratives. Rich, sensual language, a deep vein of humor and a graceful, ironic touch brand this powerful debut collection with Gasco's brazen talent. (July)