Between Feeling and Calculating: Reckoning by A.S. Penne
The stories that stand out from the collection do so without drawing unbreachable boundaries around themselves. They remain connected to the whole through their voice and tone but are lifted by the author’s skill at seamlessly crafting emotion. The best example of this is “Summer About to Happen,” a piece which, despite its straightforward narrative perspective and easy, almost deceptively simple prose, screams with the ache, curiosity and frustration of youth and what it feels like to yearn for an understanding of the future, for knowledge of the person one will become.
This constant interior scrutiny creates a mood of desire reined in by control, of longing tempered by rational analysis, of hope restrained by fear.
Or “Home Free,” a complicated story of family and personal boundaries told in the first person by Julie, a single mother. This is a story that resists complete understanding — is Julie’s perspective correct? Should the reader suspect a brokenness in Julie that is not connected to her childhood story? — yet it conveys the difficult responsibilities and uncomfortable alliances of family with striking precision.
On each blank page of the family photo albums, Uncle Gus’s hands curve round a woman’s shoulder, his fingers cupping her like a snug-fitting toque at the top of her sleeve. First it is Marge and his mother, then Marge and my mother, and eventually each of his daughters are caught in a paw. I am not far into the album before one of my own shoulders is clutched and Gus’s furry arm tickles the back of my neck. I step sideways to squeeze against one model-perfect cousin or the other and the grip of those hairy knuckles tighten. In the photos I am caught forever between Gus and Cindy or Gus and Louise, their winning smiles emphasizing my dark scowl, the unnatural tightness of my jaw.
— p. 42
As the title of the collection suggests, the characters in Reckoning are often stuck between feeling and calculating. These are individuals with a keen awareness of the possible happiness to be found in a relationship but also what must be compromised, and the perpetual weighing of these realities. This constant interior scrutiny creates a mood of desire reined in by control, of longing tempered by rational analysis, of hope restrained by fear.
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