There is beauty in words. Beauty in a story. And beauty in the characters that fill those stories. Tiphanie Yanique captures all of that in this collection of stories and a novella, steeped in culture and life.

The characters are the main thrust of each of Tiphanie Yanique's stories. And with many of them, the endings gave me pause. The stories may not be wrapped up with a neat little ribbon at the end, but they certainly offer one food for thought. Yanique's writing style is lyrical, and, while several of the stories are straight forward, with others she takes creative license. I was reminded of how much of an art writing can be. I found myself wanting to take my time with each story, lingering over the words and taking in the experience. For each story truly is its own experience.

There was not one story in the collection I did not like. In fact, I'd come across one story, decide it was a favorite and then claim the next was a favorite too. This happened over and over again.

One of my favorites was "Street Man", about a drug dealer who falls for a straight girl. He is so focused on his own life and his own perception of their relationship, keeping the street out of his relationship with her, that he misses the fact that she may have a life and ideas of her own. There is also the story about a young woman who is sent to live in a leper colony, isolated from the rest of the world. She befriends a young man whose entire world is the island, and they both long to be free. I was moved by "The Bridge Stories: A Short Collection" which is a series of stories seemingly independent of one another but interconnected at their core. Another of my favorites was the novella, "The International Shop of Coffins", covering moments in the lives of three very different characters. The story begins the same in each case, and yet each story is unique but equally sad.

The collection is made up of eight stories all together. The stories are about love, despair, regret and longing. They are about dreams, both lost and hoped for. They are set mostly in the U.S. Virgin Islands, touching on several different cultures and lifestyles. This is one of those books that would make a great book club selection, if the group is willing to take a chance on a collection of stories. ( )

In this collection of short stories and a "novella" (or a long short story) and in deceptively simple language, Yanique, who is from the Virgin Islands, tells stories of people on various Caribbean islands who are in some way isolated, grieving, confused, uprooted, not (as one of her characters put it) at home-home, as opposed to the more simple home. Her characters and their situations stayed with me as I read through the stories, some of which, such as the title story, have elements of the fantastical. But . . . I have a quibble, and that is that after reading the whole collection I see Yanique using some of the same elements in story after story: coincidence, something from the beginning of a story "explained" at the end, exact repetitions of text to show how different people perceived the same event. It all works, in the context of individual stories, but I was disappointed to see it over and over again; as a reader, I then noticed what the writer was doing instead of being completely absorbed in the story. That said, I did enjoy and was moved by the stories and the characters, and I think Yanique is excellent at portraying the lives, concerns, and souls of people in a postcolonial, migratory world.