SaltWater by Lane Ashfeldt

This collection of short stories, connected loosely by a saltwater motif that seeps through each narrative, was lovely to wade through. Ashfeldt has a way with sensory details and although the villages, cities, and oceans we visited were foreign to me, I felt she was familiar with, and emotionally connected to, each place.

I also appreciated how each story stood alone, yet characters from one place or time would show up in another. The last line of the book reads, “So calm and perfect they look as if nothing bad can ever touch them”—and that’s a good summary of my feeling after reading. Though Ashfeldt tackles some hard, sorrowful things—a sister drowning during what should be a celebratory evening, the unexplained disappearance of a lover, the sometimes confusing clashes of generations and cultures—the stories, like the sea itself, leave you with a sense that each individual we’ve met will carry on and survive, despite—or maybe even because of—what they’ve experienced. ( )