An Ornithologist's Guide to Life: Stories - Hardcover

Ann Hood is the author of eight previous books, including the best-selling memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief and best-selling novels The Book That Matters Most and The Knitting Circle. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

A first collection by novelist Hood (Something Blue; Ruby; etc.) comprises 11 conventional but affecting stories that suffer from a back-cover comparison to Lorrie Moore and Antonya Nelson. The first, "Total Cave Darkness," is winning, relating the adventures of the alcoholic narrator (who has a tender love affair with the bottle) and a young, foxy minister on an injudicious road trip. "After Zane," which begins like Amy Hempel's masterful "Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep" with a woman who staves off grief through compulsive domesticity, features a narrator who bakes constantly after the father of her unborn child decamps. Wonderful in parts, flabby in others, the story strains, like others here, for a final-page profundity (often via a lovely but easy metaphor). A gentle story about the growing friendship between a pregnant divorcée and a Martha Stewart mom, for example, is marred by an ending that is simultaneously predictable and improbable. But Hood's stories can be quite moving: "Escapes" surprises with a fierce revelation that forges a stronger bond between a troubled young girl and her aunt, while in "The Language of Sorrow" a woman and her grandson grapple with matters of death and new life. Hood is a polished writer and a careful observer, and she walks the popular funny-sad line very well, but perhaps not as adroitly as the convention's aforementioned greats.
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