Taylor Tower

To recognize life’s tender spots and extract the meaty stuff is the mark of a skilled writer. Unfortunately, Elizabeth Bass, who in Wherever Grace is Needed tackles the complexities of family, its bonds – real or imagined – and the ache to belong, fails to find these tender spots.

The characters in Teri Vlassopoulos’s debut short story collection, Bats or Swallows, are trying to make sense of themselves and the world. Many are in that purgatory between adolescence and adulthood, when the security of childhood erodes and the ugly complexities of the self and human experience are revealed.