Writing both of imagined characters and as "I",
Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw's stories deal with the experiences of loss,
disappointment and the attempt to be self-truthful. In the sequence of stories
that chart childhood family memory and the break-up of those connections
through deaths and the passage of time, there is a fine balance between
recording the feelings of desolation and the pleasures of reconstructing the
joys of the past through art and memory. There is, too, in the collection as a
whole, a richly consoling passage towards a sense of continuance and human
resilience,