The characters in Anne Panning's The Price of Eggs are indeed those whose "...working and living [are] often invisible in literature". These characters are the kinds of people that we interact with everyday, the people whose stories we do not know, the people we pass on the street without a second glance; the lunch lady and and her sister, the social studies teacher, the waitress, the janitor, the barber and his family -- people we all know but rarely know. Their ordinariness sets them apart and Panning lends great individuality to each. She shows us that every person has a story, and every person has a tragic quality to their life. Panning proves that the common individual has tragedy just as valid as any known in traditional literature -- located within the unarticulated longing that fills the lives of her characters, as it fills the lives of her readers. In the first story of her book, "This is Salvation", she first introduces us to people that we do not know, but that we might pass on the street everyday. We meet Penny, "...a big red-haired girl in her twenties..." Junior, "His dad's the drug dealer, and gives to him. This is love..." and Jasmine, "At night, she sleeps in front of tv. Low murmuring. A guardian angel..." We meet all these people and more, and Panning shows us who they are by showing us how they are. In her third person narratives, Panning utilizes an unconventional structure that employs short staccato sentences and fragments which tend to draw the reader into the work as if the sentences were a urgently running stream of thoughts/impressions drawn from observation. This style drives the reader onward, without time for immediate reflection, much the same way that life presents people to us. Her characters are deeply drawn in their synoptic style and we feel that we can ascribe motivations to their actions just by benefit of the little knowledge we have. The urgent brevity of her sentences works far better than lengthy drawn out descriptions because they function in the same way that our own powers of observation work when we examine real people that we know. When she shifts to first person narrative in such stories as "The Price of Eggs" and "Rudy and Bette's New Year" she does so in such a way that each character has the opportunity to have their own say, presenting one series of events through different eyes in a way that underscores the subjective nature of experience. This technique serves to further engage the reader, leaving them with the impression that they have had a personal conversation with each character and through that conversation have gained deeper insight into the mind of each character, by hearing what is important to each one. Although she has not spent pages building up scenery or states of mind, Panning accomplishes much in the space of a few words. One of the most stirring pieces, "Trailer Court Days" uses brief snippets of memory to allow us a complete understanding of the main character, Lizzie. These snapshots, arranged in a slide show of Lizzie's life as told through her remembrances, find their unification in the same way that we find unity in ourselves -- in who we are today because of our experiences and because of the way that we remember them. Lizzie's lack of contemplation about what these memories mean to her coupled with her unemotional, detached recounting make Lizzie all the more real. Her life is presented in the way that we remember our own lives, in disconnected events that do not always flow along a straight line and that ultimately conclude in what we are. The lack of a traditional story structure, and of "complete" traditional endings make Panning's stories resonate with realism and breathe with a life of their own. The events in The Price of Eggs are like snapshots that have etched themselves into the souls of her characters, made all the more life-like by loose threads and unfulfilled desires. None of us are easily solved puzzles, we are made of more complex stuff than can be completely articulated in the limited world of words, but Anne Panning succeeds in bringing characters and stories to life that sparkle with verisimilitude and may cause her readers to examine strangers on the street with a new interest.