Your Father Sends His Love

Evers’s latest is a collection of 12 stories centered on family. In “Lakelands,” the young victim of a hate crime copes with the imprisonment of his father, who has attacked the perpetrators of the crime. In “Wings,” a woman tries to conceal from her family a tattoo that she has gotten in memory of her sister. Doing things for family—out of love or fear—is a theme that runs through these stories, with particular success in “Live from the Palladium,” about a single mother trying to push her flailing son into the unforgiving world of stand-up comedy, the same profession his deceased father once had. “Swarm,” a futuristic story about the darker side of live-streaming, is inventive. The dialogue throughout the collection is a bit flat and formal, and sometimes characters can barely be distinguished from one another: the grandfather in “These Are the Days,” for instance, sounds like a mournful composite of elderly characters we’ve met before and sounds especially similar to the father in “Lakelands.” There are nice, memorable moments in these stories, but like the characters, they begin to run together. Agent: Lucy Luck, Aitken Alexander Associates. (Jan.)