The most predominant theme recurring throughout the collection is the one of abuse – physical, sexual, psychological; but also the substance abuse, often the catalyst to those tragedies.
Byar is the voices of numerous victims – fragile mothers, innocent children, naive teenagers. She uses her strong style to denounce ugly truths, shout her anger and disgust. She traps the reader in haunting words and scenes, where what isn’t said is scarier than what is; showing the world through a peep hole, only revealing fragments of a complete picture that might be too difficult to stomach.

She takes us on a wild ride through continents, alternating stories from her native US with the ones from her adoptive Ireland. While the Irish ones tend to be more of the huis-clos type, suffocating domestic dramas from which there is no escape, the US ones are wilder, more theatrical, with dramatic landscapes and fast-paced actions.

Her stories also take us through time, as they spam from WW2 to a near future.
Her war stories are so vivid they are almost cinematographic, bringing the past right before the reader’s eyes.

As for her more dystopian ones, they feel like the artist mucked her canvas with a thick coat of bleakness, showing us an intriguing and terrifying world that doesn’t yet exist but that might not be far off.

The tragedies in this collection are not the Romeo & Juliet theatrical type ones. They are the everyday tragedies.

They are the tragedies that happen behind your neighbour’s closed doors. The wrong turns taken at some stage in life, the choices that result in a world of pain. But in some of stories, it’s not too late to turn things back around and the author drip feeds hope throughout. She also brings humour and hints of surrealism to the collection, making it a multifaceted wonder.

Barbara Byar is never very far concealed behind her characters who she either protects or castigate. Her book exposes unpleasant truths, shows ugly worlds coated with beautiful words. The result is gutsy, brave and honest, it makes you think, cry and feel, and it stay with you long after you’ve closed the book on its stunning final story.