On "Innocence" by Summer Block (2904 words) ***

Summer Block's story is about a nun who keeps watch over infants, a nun, I suspect, who would have loved to have children of her own--in fact, in a way does. She is possessive. She is obsessive. She is fascinating. But what really makes this piece shine are the little moments in between, the snatches of insight, like this one, about white flight and the dominance of immigrants in a neighborhood (and at the mission where the nun works): "I worry when I see the faith recede to the ends of the world, all those new converts like the whirl in the last dregs of bath water before it runs down the drain." Or there's the nun's claim that she can love a child just as much as a physical mother, that carrying a baby in one's body is not so important, because "the body is a passing thing." For more such beautiful passages, read the story here at Emprise Review.

On "China Mobile" by Summer Block (3381 words) ****

Stories in exotic locales or involving exotic characters have long enchanted, almost always in part because of the exoticism itself. Good stories, however, do more than just show off the exoticness. Sometimes they manage to convey a sense of place and time and character that makes one think for a moment, "Yes, I too was there," even though of course you weren't. This is one of those. "China Mobile" does this in part by running down a description of a list of friends, friends like Chloe, who "was more than just pretty, but . . . was also pretty." A few sentences on each, a few comments on drinking and getting along, and one gets a sense of this narrator's world. It is a small place, just one little microcosm in something so much larger, so much larger that it is beyond words. We can't know China, but we can know this one little piece of it--a piece of it that is at base still American. One of the things I admired so much about Jay McInerney's novel Ransom, on first read many years ago, was the way it was able to conjure up a world similar to this, a world of American exiles at "home" in some strange, weird place. Block manages something similar here, but without the excesses of plot that made Ransom seem far fetched. Read the story here at Stirring.