In “Blue Tango” a sensitive man returns from the Korean War to his not-too-thrilled-to-see-him wife. He reminisces about how he left, against her wishes, and wonders if perhaps his wife had needed him more than his country. It is an interesting twist on how to see the returning war hero through the perspective of a dispirited wife who’s turned from her mate. “I’m not someone who should be left alone,” Delia tells her hubby, and eventually he hears her. So though we do not particularly like Delia’s character — she has had an affair with the gardener while her husband was gone — it is another of those moments that Winn prods us into taking a look at the situation from a new angle.

Real people live in Winn’s stories. In “Gumbo Limbo” we meet another woman in whom we may recognize ourselves. June DeLisle says “too fast her perm had wilted flat, and her slacks stuck at the top of her thighs,” another instance of how a pervading sense of under-confidence can make us feel ugly despite having tried to comport ourselves for the outside world.

It is the probability that the plot may be based on a true story that makes the reader want to distance herself from the voice of the narrator.

“Gumbo Limbo” is also a story about the experience of being female in a male-dominated world. June DeLisle is so motivated by her considerations of Norm that she does not see the extent to which her husband’s preferences affect her. She relates everything she sees, does and thinks back to him until it colours her entire life. When she meets a stranger on holiday, she notices something about the girl that cues her memory: “Changes passed over the girl’s face so fast. Norm would slide his hand up and down in front of his face changing it from a smile to a frown to an angry jack-o-lantern…” Even when Norm is nowhere in sight, he is inside her, talking.

Two of the weaker stories in the collection are “Another Way to Make Cleopatra Cry” and “Frankie Floats,” but this weakness is perhaps only relative in terms of the other strong works. In “Another Way to Make Cleopatra Cry,” the language is too often overdone with the result that the reader feels pushed. Whenever Winn refers to the bikers in this story, she uses a different term for them — beefaloes, beefomatics, road-hogs, leather-creakers, pork-bellies, porkers, Harley-honkers, Danglemen — as though wanting to wake us up, remind us where we are. But it is an unnecessary tactic — perhaps under-confidence on Winn’s part — because we are never far from the setting or the voice of the narrator. The repetitive list of terms only serves to remind us that a point is being made, and made, and made again.

On the other hand, the harshness of this story is very unavoidable, and the real possibility of it actually sucker-punches the reader at the end. A no-good father takes off and leaves his kids with his latest floozy, another person he’s abandoned. The floozy figures out a way to unload the kids on a soft-hearted bartender when a biker ‘rescues’ them from beside the road. It is the probability that the plot may be based on a true story that makes the reader want to distance herself from the voice of the narrator.