The Touchstones short story collection from Ann Ahnemann features a potpourri of pleasing tales with endearing characters and fascinating situations: The Backside is about an aging jockey who takes a stand against the modern slaughtering of horses for meat. Cody Treat is a young Native American who, strangely enough, owns and operates a fishing boat in New England. It's the story of his contending with the sea and business competitors along with his new love interest, Annie, who's struggling with her own identity as she breaks from her family ties and starts a new life. Serving the Paper gives the account of child neglect and the troubles of the poor in a small town in Maine. It features two police figures who will make an appearance the next story. Wolf Man chronicles life after Vietnam for one soldier who didn't quite make the grade. Durwood Trey tells of a young girl's formative years and one of the last summers she will spend with her aunt in Genesee, PA where she'll begin the shedding of innocence with the assistance of her somewhat obnoxious friend, Cath, and the good-hearted Durwood Trey. Augury Road Trip, surely the strangest story in this collection, is the macabre tale of a father and son's overnight stay in a small Missouri town where nothing and no one is normal and nature itself takes a twist. Lastly we have something akin to a love story, yet not quite, when a young girl in the opening stages of her pregnancy is sent to live with great aunt on the farm in 1960s Pennsylvania where the family skeletons come out to make themselves known in more ways than one. Despite the homely feel to these stories there's a vitality, an underlying presence of things teaming with life and substance, that are all too often absent from many modern tales. This is a collection you won't soon forget.