Vanishing and Other Stories

July 26, 2010
The characters in these tidy stories navigate turbulent relationships with family members and romantic partners, many of whom vanish, as in the title story, about a daughter's struggles to reconcile her father's sudden desertion of their family. In "The Weather," a teenage girl's new friend betrays her. "And if there was one thing I knew," the narrator says, "it was that this wouldn't get easier. It would ache for years." This lesson holds true for most of these stories, particularly in "Remember, Relive," the second-person narrative of a young woman grappling with a traumatic past as her mother sinks into an Alzheimer's haze. Other stories have decidedly narrow focuses, as with "The Separation," about an 11-year-old's relationship with her aloof older sister, or "Escape," about a young widower's fledgling gambling addiction. Though the stories share themes and narrative tone, each stands firmly on its own, with Willis in full control as the characters face down their losses.

September 1, 2010

The well-made, mostly downbeat stories in Canadian writer Willis's debut collection feature characters with an intimate understanding of loss—loss past, loss present, even the losses to come.

In the title story, a daughter struggles to come to grips with the disappearance of her father, a writer—but the detective work here is to plumb the ultimately unsolvable mysteries of mind and motive. "Escape" features a formerly stolid and reliable doctor who, after his wife's untimely death, first takes up nocturnal trips to the casino and then a not-quite-innocent-but-not-quite-sinister obsession with a female blackjack dealer who was once a sleight-of-hand artist. "Caught" recounts a dalliance between a female ichthyologist and one of her undergraduate students. Willis tells the story in the subjunctive mood, speculating, switching perspectives, blurring details: "There's more than one way it could go," she begins. "Outside the office there might be the shuffle of shoes on waxed floor..." In less steady hands this might feel gimmicky or showy, but Willis employs the technique with great patience and deftness, thwarting again and again the reader's desire to find a safe and stable place to make judgments—that's not, she delicately insists, the point. Several stories, notably "Sky Theatre" and "The Separation," anatomize the complexities and pleasures of female friendship. The former ends with a fleeting, beautifully realized moment of connection between two high-school girls, the narrator and the class beauty who's now confined to a wheelchair; the latter explores the fraught relationship between two young sisters traveling back and forth by bus to visit their father during a marital separation.

Willis's style is resolutely unflashy, and she doesn't show much range of tone and mood, but this is a remarkably mature, self-assured debut by a writer whose work will draw comparisons to Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant.

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August 1, 2010
A remarkable new writer, Willis delivers 14 lovely tales and countless vivid moments in her first fiction collection. She introduces us to characters living simple lives while coping with various forms of strugglefrom a father trying to reconnect with his daughter to a 13-year-old girl losing her virginity to her sisters husband. Willis deftly creates an array of individualsurban, rural, young, old, educated, naivedealing with the effects of longing, whether for a relationship or their former selves. As one narrator says, People are always spiraling off in other directions, like twigs knocked around by a river current. It is stunning to see how Willis characters shape themselves around what is missing in their lives, and to see how Willis takes such care with all of the people who inhabit her stories. Readers will feel the joy of discovery in reading an emerging writer whose work will crowd our bookshelves for years to come.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)