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"  Hints of Henry James inform the eight stories in Canadian writer Carol Windley&amp;#039;s American debut, Home Schooling (Atlantic Monthly Press). Like that earlier master, Windley pays scrupulous attention to small, consequential gestures, to a sense of the uncanny that marks the proximity of characters to places and things, and as much to what goes unsaid as to what&amp;#039;s spoken. Her tales emit moments of sudden radiance that unmask narrative mysteries while wrapping them ever more tightly around their outcomes.  &amp;quot;What Saffi Knows&amp;quot; (which echoes the James masterpiece &amp;quot;What Maisie Knew&amp;quot;) is a chilling tale\u2014set, like most of these stories, on Vancouver Island and in cities of the Pacific Northwest, and told in flashback from two decades further on\u2014about a woman whose childhood innocence was lost right before her barely comprehending eyes, none of the adults in her young life ever having been privy to her inescapable witness. The opening lines of the astonishing title story are a high-wire act of narrative prestidigitation, mimicking the fault lines of memory and the compensatory gift of reinvention. &amp;quot;It began with three sisters who lived in a cottage beside the sea. Except the cottage wasn&amp;#039;t beside the sea, it was some distance away, and it wasn&amp;#039;t a cottage, it was an old farmhouse, and the farm was no longer a farm, it was a boarding school.&amp;quot; Tragedy follows when a schoolboy drowns, bringing other sorrows in its wake. &amp;quot;The Joy of Life,&amp;quot; about how art imitates life and vice versa, spotlights a web of friendships, lovers, deceits, and dreads brought forth in a manner as lively and unpredictable as the &amp;quot;restless shadows [cast] along the walls&amp;quot; from the coal fire burning in the hearth in the room in Wales in which the story begins. Let&amp;#039;s hope that Windley&amp;#039;s novel, Breathing Under Water, and a previous story collection, Visible Light, both of which have yet to be published in the United States, follow this book of pure magic, pronto. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a9639/north-by-northwest-284945/>