Save Me, Stranger

Krouse (Tell Me Everything) delivers an affecting if occasionally schematic collection in which characters find help out of various states of despair. In the title story, a teenage boy intervenes during an armed robbery in a convenience store after the thieves take a woman hostage, sacrificing himself so she can stay with her 10-year-old daughter. The robbers shoot him, and before he dies, he utters the name Olivia, prompting the woman and her daughter to search for Olivia and tell her about his heroism. “Eat My Moose” follows two terminally ill veterans, Bonnie and Colum, who illicitly assist others with similar health conditions in death by suicide. The satisfying work offers Bonnie and Colum reprieve from the pain of their cancers, up until the story’s poignant conclusion. As the collection’s title suggests, strangers often bring salvation, though the situations aren’t always mortal. In “The Piano,” a middle-aged woman is offered a chance to play again after giving up the instrument decades earlier, when her parents deemed it impractical. Krouse sets up the recurring motif a bit too neatly at times, but in the volume’s best entries she makes the thrill of new beginnings palpable (“the relentlessness of the current, a stranger’s hand, and that strong pull back to life”). This is worth a look. Agent: Mary Evans, Mary Evans, Inc. (Jan.)