Toss a Mediterranean motif of pagan magic alongside a Laurentian concern with the amblings of love and you have a good idea what this collection is all about. While her images and plots are fantastical, Ioannides' prose is simple, in the most elegant sense of an oral storyteller's bare-bones approach to simplicity. Half of her characters find themselves ruled by state or religious strictures to the point of anality (in post-Freudian terms), half find themselves misunderstood and--not shamed, for they proceed with an inner surety--but isolated or even persecuted. And so they fight back. Ioannides seems to be saying that we join hands even when refusing to join hands, even when refusing to dive into Laurentian love. Thus the irony of the form she has chosen: stories linked into a novel, a storynovel.