Swim Back To Me is an amazingly assured book of short stories, bookmarked by two novellas, which deftly explores the fragility of family relationships. In many instances, it took my breath away with its perception and insights.

The entire first half of the book is dominated by one story – Walk For Mankind, set on the Stanford campus during the Watergate era. Richard is a somewhat gawky coming-of-age boy, who is shifted between his aloof history father and his do-gooder mother. In contrast to this fragmented family is Sasha, the red-haired and impulsive daughter of the bohemian and exhilarating Horowitz family.

With great acuity, Ann Packer explores this momentous year, the escapades into the heady world of drugs and sex, and the fissures that threaten the family and the relationship between the friends. Richard wonders, “How do people do it, pry themselves from their pasts?” Some of the answer will be revealed in the last novella, where we meet Sasha again, this time, at the midpoint of her life and in the unlikely role as caregiver to her hypochondriac and narcissistic father. She has pried herself from the past…or has she really checked out from the drama?

Other stories are equally powerful. In Molten, we meet a mother with pathological grief, whose teenage son died an unexpected hero’s death. She reflects, “It was too fierce, the pain of having children. It hurt just to love them, let alone this. It hurt to be impatient, bored, entranced. Always knowing they were on their way away.” She defies the expectation of nobility and we fear for her by the end.

Then there’s Jump, the story of distorted expectations – a thin, downcast, Latino youth is revealed to be something entirely different than he seems. And Dwell Time, one of my favorites: a portrait of a seemingly perfect blended second marriage that comes with unrealized demons that have not been shed. Laura, the protagonist, learns the hard way that “dwell time” is the time that the soldiers in us have between deployments. Firstborn, another fine story, is a tender story about a soon-to-be-father whose wife is affected by the crib death of the young son she had had with her first husband.

These stories – woven with the threads of the complexity of human behavior – will not soon cede into memory. Each is a little gem.