Dark Roots

In her debut collection of short stories, acclaimed Aussie Kennedy gets off to a running start. The narrator of the first story, “What Thou and I Did, Till We Loved,” visits her girlfriend in the hospital after a brutal car crash. Posing as her sister, she links fingers with her dying love, who’s in a hopeless coma. Meanwhile, she idly lets her career and life outside the hospital slip away.

Kennedy takes a fairly simple and common plot and pounds it into another shape altogether. The narrator bulldozes through her grief and regret, the heavy mix of emotions stirred up when a loved one is suddenly incapacitated, but not yet dead. She writes with precision, even in simile: “It pumps out of me, my will. I lift Beth a little in her bed and feel her flesh move across her glutinous bones like fabric, her muscles dissolved away.”

But if “What Thou…” gets things rolling, the next story, “A Pitch too High for the Human Ear,” throws the emergency brake. A competent, but ultimately monotone story about a man who feels distant from his wife, it lacks any of the emotional punch found in the first story. “Kill or Cure,” the story of a woman who leaves the city to live with her husband on a farm, suffers the same fate. In fact, we were disappointed to discover Kennedy filled most of the book with the latter type of story, where the emotions characters wrestle with most often are displacement and boredom. We empathize.