Sketches from Life

In the engaging stories in Sketches from Life, ordinary people find themselves in complex and dramatic situations.

Gillian Skeen-McKee’s insightful short story collection, Sketches from Life, exposes both the beauty and the rough underside of life. In these stories, flawed, ordinary people are faced with extraordinary challenges under the shadow of apartheid and racism.

Set in South Africa and the United States, these fourteen stories feature relatable characters of different ages, occupations, and races. A doctor from Durban, South Africa, finds his life and his faith in people turned upside-down when his emergency surgery on a Russian sailor brings him into conflict with Russia’s prison-like grid of rules and regulations. A young girl is faced with the reality of sex and child abuse far too early in life. A woman who is in love with two men at once learns the degree to which racism and cultural expectations limit her freedom. A coincidence saves a man from death on September 11th, 2001, changing the course of his life. Such challenges are engaging, entertaining, and sometimes frustrating; characters reveal their strengths and battle their weaknesses.

Intuition plays a strong role in the stories, though it is often ignored or cannot be acted upon. It appears in a young girl’s uneasy awareness that “Uncle Pete” had darker motives for his visits to her mother and through a child’s suspicion that “something was a little odd—just not right” about a strange man’s invitation to go for ice cream. These and other instances of advance warning are ignored, setting the stage for the disturbing events that follow.

Descriptions are evocative and lively: a small Toyota is “clawing its way up the mountainside;” and an oncoming weather front looks like “a sliding lid being drawn over us.” Clear descriptions of social circumstances, along with the blending of outer and inner conflict, make the stories more complex.

The stories are uneven in their portrayals of emotion. Some show characters responding physically when in the grip of strong emotions, their “knuckles white, teeth clenched, and stomachs quivering.” Elsewhere, responses to gutwrenching events are cerebral, even robotic. In “On a Clear Day,” a September 11th survivor meets a fellow survivor in the street and says, “Oh Mal, I’m so pleased you’re not up there.” Mal, upon seeing the buildings crumble and a man flail as he plummets to the ground, is described as feeling “sick,” a mild response given that it was only a coincidence that had saved him from the same fate.

Misplaced, extra, and missing commas are distracting. Other punctuation errors, missing words, run-on sentences, and occasional errors in spelling and word usage mar the work. Clear, crisp black-and-white photographs at the beginning of each story hint at important elements to come.

In the engaging stories in Sketches from Life, ordinary people find themselves in complex and dramatic situations, their responses conditioned by the places, times, and cultures in which they live.

- Foreword Reviews