In the interest of full disclosure, I've known Liza Wieland since we were children. But even if I'd never met her, I'd recognize her significant talent. In all of her stories and in her novel (The Names of the Lost), Liza exhibits tender feelings for her characters and for their struggle to connect with others. Yes, some of the stories are tinged with sadness, but they're also buoyed by kindness. Way to go, Liza!

The stories of Wieland's second collection reveal a series of displaced characters longing for intimacy in the wide open spaces of the West. Often, what these characters find is that they are not alone, but joined by a series of presences, ghosts that weave themselves through the nine stories, haunting these characters with reminders of pasts they do not fully understand.

Irradiation, for example, begins with the death of the narrator's husband at the hands of Christine, a teenage cancer patient. When Christine recovers, an infatuation develops, forcing the narrator to befriend Christine, follow her to New York, and eventually lift her life from her, stealing a career and a boyfriend in the process. In Salt Lake, Em plays witness to the deterioration of her mother's health, and in the process learns of her mother's past, including the story of her own father. These revelations hint toward a legacy Em ultimately cannot bear to inherit.

Ghosts also haunt the narrator of Gray's Anatomy, the man who almost invented Nylon. He and two other men - one the inventor of Styrofoam and the other a Disney animator - meet in the hospital waiting room while on vacation on the California coast, in a story that creates a beautiful dance between their histories and the sometimes uncertain promise of a future for the ailing children these men cherish.

The wide open spaces are not always wide enough. In the stories Laramie and Purgatory, the narrators find themselves on long car trips with lovers they have grown distant from. As the narrator of Purgatory ruefully dreams of escape all the way to their destination, the family home, only to find the chaos that exists there somehow empowers her to dismiss her lover. After a blowout on the way to Yellowstone, the narrator of Laramie and her lover become further delayed by Al Laudermilk, his poet sister, and their senile father, who open their lives and offer a vision of how one gets trapped in Laramie, a vision that frightens the narrator out of love.

In the title story, an absent father named Mack travels across the country to the Bay Area at the request of his dying son. Their sprint of a relationship transforms both men, leading ultimately to a dream-like state of motion that Mack almost cannot control.

Wieland balances this longing and sorrow with a sense of hope - filtered through the lives of children. In Halloween, several neighbor women reveal private childhood secrets, which begin to sink in for a young girl as she learns to cope with the death of her father and the motherly responsibility she seems to feel for her younger brother. In the wonderfully lyrical The Loop, The Snow, Their Daughters, The Rain, two young families enjoy a trip to Chicago while their young daughters delight in discovering the power of language.

This power is at the center of Wieland's prose and her command of the craft of storytelling. In Laramie, her narrator recollects that:

". . . there were two kinds of poems, the kind that when you read them, they fill up a space inside you, an empty place that you didn't even know was there. And then there was the kind that when you read them, they made a space that you had to learn to live with, had to carry around until something, some experience filled it in."

These stories have done both.

It moved me, caused me to think, and many times made me sad. There is a thread of melancholy running through Wieland's work, a kind of hovering sadness that tends to move in closer in some stories and sometimes hover farther off in the background in others, yet it is always there. This quality seems to me to be one of expressed intelligence. I think the more aware we are of the world around us, the more empathetic we are, even in our happiest moments, to the pain, injustice, and bitterness in life. And this, for me at least, often makes itself felt in a kind of melancholy or sadness that can never be quite defined, never quite confronted, but simply known.

I feel Wieland's work has always had a way of dealing with the day to day sublteties, the little battles won and lost, that is not only realistic, but intelligently observed and quietly expressed.

p.s. If the reviewer from Kirkus can't even figure out how to use quotes and apostrophes, how intelligent of a reader can s/he be?

Liza Wieland is an incredible writing talent. She is also a creative writing teacher in a California college and no one need apply the old adage to her about "those who can't do, teach." In fact, I'm really sad that she can't devote 100% of her time to writing. She only has one other novel out, which I promptly ordered. She has some short story collections too. She only has this one novel carried by my public library, which is unusual, as it carries just about everything. All I can say is, thank God for university presses or I guess this wouldn't have seen the light of day. Why was it deemed so non-commercial? Well, it is intelligent and I guess in most media and the arts that puts you in the hole. If you don't want to think, don't want to marvel over certain passages and reread them to fully appreciate them, this may not be for you, especially if you don't like gorgeous, beautiful, virtually poetic prose. If all you like is steamroller straight ahead plot driven fiction, she is not solely concerned with satisfying that reader need. What she does do is create one heck of a story and a cast of characters out of her imagination using one fact from the real world. That fact is that she pretends that the father in the story, who is living like a hermit in the mountains outside of Santa Fe, is the unabomber and that his family members, just like the real life unabomber, are going to be the ones who have to bring him to account. In real life, his brother turned him in to the law. In this account, his daughter is brought into the dilemma by her stepbrother, who is convinced her father is the unabomber and wants her help bringing him in. Jane, the daughter, is a gorgeous young woman, also brilliant like her father, who alternates between being a stripper in Las Vegas and a dance teacher for children, first in California and then in New Mexico. Her stepbrother is a teacher and her father was a math professor at the University of California but has lived as a hermit for years. The story is told from shifting points of view and the most chilling narrative is the father's as you are inside his mind and able to see the brilliance and madness in there first hand. This is a very moving, very touching book, which takes bends in the road in fiction that are wholly unpredictible and an utter delight. The father's relationship with his late twin brother, killed in the Vietnam War, is just one other nuance to the father's story that incredibly richens it. There is a romantic element for Jane's part of the story, an extremely ironic but satisfying one.

In light of the recent tragedies we have endured, Liza Wieland's novel Bombshell takes on even greater weight and significance as she takes the horrific events of the Uni-Bomber and puts a name and a face to those involved. Like a master painter who unveils more with each stroke, Wieland builds a tremendously suspenseful story which evokes anger, outrage, sympathy and understanding. Told through the eyes of three characters, Bombshell allows us to experience the terrible toll that these events take on individuals as well as society at large. The three different views from the professor, his stripper/wanderer daughter and her step-brother add a personal dimension allowing the reader to linger in the pain and horror of the realization of who is responsible while slowly letting up the shade that allows us, at first, a glimpse and then a full-throttled revelation into the minds of the characters. Is this a story about the abject evil of people who perpetrate such acts or is it a love story in which the professor is performing penance and showing his love in the only way his his skewed perception of reality will allow?

Liza Wieland, through multiple veiwpoints à la Faulkner's "As I lay Dying", has tapped into all the loneliness, fear, and love that can bring a community together in a time of crisis. Her prose is lyrical and dense, sometimes almost poetry, often requiring time to absorb, but what well spent time! This is a story that will stay with you, and you won't want it any other way.