In this compelling collection of linked short stories, Lucy Daniels illuminates both the beauty of the North Carolina coast and the complexity of the people who own and inhabit it. In her words, the stories ?evolved from two seemingly different but amazingly similar transformational situations in my life. The first was experiencing the natural world I knew as a child: the sea, the sandy beach, and the maritime forest at North Carolina's Crystal Coast. The second, based on my life's work, was my clinical (psychoanalytic) and personal experience dealing with human psychology.' Through stories told in expertly crafted prose, Daniels is able to identify ?with a live oak twisted by wild winds as well as with a person traumatized by loss.' In doing so, she invites readers to make their own personal connections with the relationship between the unforgiving forces of nature and the struggles of the human predicament.