Feeding Strays by Stefanie Freele (Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2009)

Every reader has guilty pleasures. Mine include the Spenser novels by the late Robert Parker. They’re predictable. Like guilty pleasures should be. Spenser is always cool, always nails the bad guy and always has the love of a good woman. Authors of perennial sequels are careful not to stray too far from the formula their readers have come to expect. They have guilty pleasures too.

After reading the first short story in Feeding Strays, I temporarily relinquished my desire for predictability and steeled myself for the unexpected. Freele’s stories reminded me of why I love to read. It’s not just escape; it’s freedom. It wasn’t only the story lines and characters that kept me in a state of suspended expectation, it was the fearless tightrope-walking language. In “The Space Between Two Sentences,” a woman’s clairvoyant power to read people may heighten the tension in each new encounter or merely reveal the mundane outlines of people’s lives.

“This one eats Spam and calls his mother every other night. That one drove a VW Bug in college when he was free, but his new wife doesn’t want to know about his past, just wants him to keep the SUV clean and the checks coming in. One lady buys clothes at Goodwill, but pretends they’re from Macy’s, another hires younger men for massages and kids herself that they really enjoy her company. Our stories are for our own pleasure, to laugh, to pass the time, to make the job more interesting.”

Freele weaves together the ordinary and extraordinary to create new planes of existence where the secret lives of characters can be expressed without the usual fears and worries that keep us bound to the expected. In each of these beautifully crafted fifty four short stories, Freele manages to do something new, and invites us to read with new eyes.

She may have ruined me for Spenser, but I doubt that we could ever entirely escape our need for familiar routines. In a chaotic world, they’re addictively reassuring. (Have you ever noticed that people will gravitate to the same seat in a house, a church or a waiting room?) We want to claim our space in the world. Our favorite stories are another place for us to inhabit. We return to the same one over and over, even if it comes in different wrapping paper, to reassure ourselves that we still have a chair in the game. When stories come along that are unfamiliar – that defy our ability to force them into the mold we have made of our lives – they work a different sort of magic in us. It’s a conversation with a stranger who is becoming a friend with each new word we speak to one another.

Like moments of unexpected grace that sometimes reach into our lives, Feeding Strays is guilt free reading.

Stefanie Freele’s website

http://www.stefaniefreele.com/

Lost Horse Press

http://www.losthorsepress.org/