Trevor Clark creates such complex and diverse characters in Escape and Other Stories (Now or Never Publishing, 2012) that it's like reading ten different stories from ten different authors. In the title story, Escape, a father picks up his ten-year-old daughter for their weekend visit. He has no intention of bringing her back to her mother. From the outset of the story, the narrator makes himself look exactly like the bad dad his estranged wife makes him out to be. His hope for becoming his daughter's primary parent rests solely on a forged document that will get them across the border. He has not considered the most important element in his dreamed future wherein he will raise his daughter solo: Is this something his daughter wants? When he shares his plan with her, we are stuck somewhere between sympathy and revulsion. "Later, there was a scene in the room when I wouldn't let her call her mother. During the night I tossed and turned, wondering how other fathers who took their children away managed it. Did they just lie? Say the mother was dead, that she didn't love them-what? It had to be traumatic any way you cut it."; He feels the need to redeem himself in his daughter's eyes, but at what cost? Escape is all too believable. Life is painfully awkward much of the time, and we disappoint ourselves as much as we disappoint others.

By Monica Rolinski