Bodies of Water is a collection of fourteen short stories by Marylee MacDonald. A young man working at a marina on Lake Powell is conflicted over his desire to leave home and the responsibility he feels for his family. But a work of art in the lake offers him a new perspective. After Hurricane Katrina, an elderly woman is rescued but forced to leave her beloved dog. However, her seemingly indifferent niece has other ideas. A freeway repair worker rehabilitating from a terrible accident slowly realizes that the relationship with his wife is just not the same anymore, but he is recovering physically. An airplane pilot visits her stepfather at the nursing home, hoping to persuade a nursing home worker to take care of him while she moves away for her new job.

Every story in this book is set near a mass of water. Marylee MacDonald presents a captivating collection of tales that are emotionally moving and highlight different facets of the human condition. All the protagonists face different kinds of adversity, conflict, and choices. Bodies of Water evokes a lot of emotions that many of us have felt at one point or another in our lives. I found myself absorbed in each of these tales and came away with a deeper appreciation for short stories. MacDonald clearly is a master of her craft. Despite the short narratives, the author successfully makes you care for the characters and sympathize with them. That's because they talk, act, and make choices like real people. All in all, I'm really glad that I read this book and highly recommend it.

Marylee MacDonald’s short story collection, Bodies of Water, delivers fourteen stories with well-drawn characters standing figuratively or literally at different shorelines. A marina worker discovers a submerged kitchen and must choose between art school and his dying father’s wishes. A divorced teacher enlists the help of Bosnian refugee house painters to kill her ex-husband’s horse, and they make a startling discovery about themselves in “Some Were Rabbits.” An eighty-two-year-old hurricane survivor seeks a blueprint to rebuild her Florida community in “The Ark Encounter.” In “Bubbly Creek,” a Chicago construction worker rethinks his marriage after being plunged into water. A scientist nurses a sick American yoga student in Rishikesh. Whether it is about men making confessions about family crises after being trapped on an oil rig or an art dealer torn between her terror of intimacy and a Greek sailor’s promise of home, these stories are deeply moving and human.

Marylee MacDonald creates characters who are ordinary people caught at life-defining moments. They are always contemplating whether to stay or walk away; to remain silent or speak, to keep on treading water or jump in. The prose is surgically precise, and the author’s economy of words is exceptional. This is the work of a wordsmith who understands the value of every word, the depth of every short sentence, and how to let elements of nature wash over the souls of her characters to reveal what they carry inside. Bodies of Water is a collection of stories you don’t rush through. You read one and find yourself thinking about its hidden importance before moving to the next. While the stories cross social strata and continents, they share a preoccupation with how water obscures and exposes the truth.

Marylee MacDonald’s Bodies of Water is a glowing short story collection in which water — scarce, sacred, overwhelming, or incidental — becomes the center around which fourteen disparate lives orbit. A marine worker finds an art object that bolsters his desire to escape a dying town in “Drought.” In “Some Were Rabbits,” an ESL teacher and Bosnian refugees plan to kill a horse, but instead discover compassion, and a hurricane survivor contemplates creating a modern-day, floating ark for displaced neighbors in “The Ark Encounter.” In “Bubbly Creek,” a blinded worker experiences physical and marital recovery. During a Bahamas vacation, two firefighters face trauma in “The Lock-out Room.” In “The Sacred Shore,” a yoga student travels to India, where illness sparks an unexpected connection. Whether dealing with the toxic currents of Chicago’s Bubbly Creek or the sacred ghats of the Ganges, the men and women in these stories are caught in moments when they must make a choice: to flee or stay, swim or sink, while grief, climatic catastrophe, migration, and the desire to reshape their worlds become motivating factors.

Water is a powerful symbol in Bodies of Water, and it is never only one thing; it is whatever the person standing at its edge needs it to be—a mirror, a warning, an escape, or a tomb. Marylee MacDonald’s storytelling is as fluid as her subject, and she writes with cinematic, patient attention to detail, infusing each story with its own rhythm: some still like mirrored lakes, some rushing like floodwaters, and some like sheer ripples of the waves. Water becomes a powerful metaphor that reveals characters to themselves without diminishing their humanity and authenticity. The deliberate pacing thrives on quiet revelations rather than dramatic plot twists. The prose achieves a rare transparency that lets readers see through the intriguing characters. This is an ingeniously crafted short story collection that examines modern loneliness, ecological ruptures, and displacement from angles that define the intersection between humanity and nature. The author’s imagination grants full agency to ordinary characters, and that alone made this collection endearing to me.

Seeing that humans consist of roughly 60-70% water, we are, in fact, all bodies of water. Despite our differences in gender, ethnicity, age, or even where or when we live or have lived, humans face or have faced doubt and uncertainty. Nevertheless, the ways we experience that uncertainty and doubt are varied. This basic truth is made abundantly clear in Marylee MacDonald’s collection of short stories, Bodies of Water. In them, readers are introduced to a myriad of characters and settings near or by bodies of water. Among these are a young marina worker on drought-ridden Lake Powell in Arizona, and an old woman on flooded Pine Island, Florida, in the aftermath of a hurricane. A young yoga instructor travels to an international convention along the Ganges River in India, and a woman travels to Lake Biwa in Japan to save her failing marriage. These are only some of the diverse characters in the collection.

My two favorite stories in Bodies of Water are The Ark Encounter and The Sacred Shore. Not only could I identify with the two protagonists, but I also enjoyed how each plot unfolded, one concerning an old woman’s loss of a beloved pet and her strained relationship with her niece, and the other a chance meeting between two yogis who learn that opposites really can attract. As with the other stories in the collection, author Marylee MacDonald unpacks her characters’ complex storylines with a deft hand and the precision needed for short fiction. The stories, too, are highly original, defying my attempts to compare them to any I have read before. Highly recommended for those literary fiction readers who enjoy stories with heart and humor that challenge easy assumptions regarding the human condition.