Mother Rocket

Mother Rocket is a collection of seven stories peopled with characters who walk the fault line between assured self-knowledge and dangerous self-deception. Many of Rita Ciresi's stories are centered on momentous occasions: children are conceived or planned for, teenagers reach maturity, marriages are contemplated and broken, parents are mourned. In "The End of the Season," Janie is forced to examine the boredom and uncertainty of her marriage as she sorts through. Mementos from her past. She fears that she and her husband married "not as lovers but as pals, as two people who had sown their oats and were ready to settle for second best, ready to sit back and let their children take a stab at finding passion." In the title story, Jude Silverman, a "bargain basement of neuroses," is the principal dancer in a "politically aware," avant-garde dance troupe. Although she finds a tenuous happiness with Rob Jones, a photographer as earnest. And sane as his name suggests, Jude longs for the drama of her past and the chance to be a martyr for an undefined cause. Two stories in the collection concern Karl, a man raised in a Catholic family and under the shadow of his older brother, Lorenz. "Re