Farewell Navigator

Blotilla, Egg Boy, Squinch; Black and Blue—a married couple—own dogs named Swim and Swam. This partial catalog of self-consciously weird character names doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about Farewell Navigator, Leni Zumas’s debut collection of short stories, but it should tell you enough to know whether you want to know more.

The stories are built around quirky premises or conceits, for which the characters—mostly angsty teens and the institutionalized—sometimes seem little more than vehicles. In the title story, the child of two blind parents contemplates leaving home to see the world. In “Waste No Time if This Method Fails,” romance blossoms between a man who may or may not be criminally insane and the woman who serves lunch at his asylum’s cafeteria. “How He Was a Wicked Son” traces devotion and heartbreak among recovering addicts in a halfway house that the narrator refers to as “a nursing home for the young.” “Handfasting,” about a would-be witch and the two lovers she has spurned, is easily the best story in the book. The characters—even Egg Boy, “whose heart was torn to pieces and left in the road”—feel like real people, rather than host bodies for bizarro memes.

Zumas—whether she knows it or not—is part of an established tradition of decisively female (though not necessarily feminine) magic realism that at its best gives us Shelley Jackson and Aimee Bender, and at its worst, Karen Russell and Jeanette Winterson. Zumas is somewhere in the middle. Her writing is never less than competent, and her stories are distinctive, if not quite original. Farewell Navigator probably won’t be the best book you read this year, but it certainly won’t be the worst.