In Don't Take This the Wrong Way, Magowan and Ross probe the stories we tell each other and ourselves. The characters in these 25 stories deceive and manipulate, they scrutinize and admonish, but also, they earnestly seek to draw meaning from the flotsam of their lives. Two friends mocking the needy, sancitmonious co-worker they call "the Kindness Woman,'' confront their own painful longing for someone to accept them. A woman who developed unusually acute vision during the last stages of her marriage wonders after the divorce if perhaps she'd been wrong to make so much of what she'd observed; perhaps her ex's "best qualities are visible only at a distance." Many of these characters are trying to get by with clumsy skills, limited resources, and impaired caretakers. Grown siblings recall bitterly their father's neglect when their mother died: "You hear about kids being raised by wolves, but the three of us were for a while there raised by kitchen cabinets and vacuum cleaners--nothing sentient." A girl living on a military base grapples with the terrible violence of war by playing a game she knows better than to tell her mother about. These characters enjoy burning bridges. A woman reluctantly enscripted by the self-satisfied friend she doesn't much like to be each other's "accountability buddies," gleefully learns that her friend's eight-year-old daughter has started a "Sexy Club." The characters in these stories bond over their mutual love of words, and they battle and break up over callously or sloppily chosen words. A college student living back at home for the summer begins an affair with an older coworker after noticing that he was also someone "who found language revealing, worth inspection." In some instances, wanting connection, these characters may read a lot into very few words, as when a pleasant stranger at the gym hands one narrator a towel to wipe off a sweaty exercise bike: "In that mutual exchange-'Gross,' 'Gross,' 'Thanks,' which she responded to not vocally but with a commiserating nod-I felt a meeting of the minds." Through precise prose, deep affection, wry humor, and a measure of snark, Magowan and Ross invite readers to recognize how lonely, petty, yet hopeful people are, and how desperately they want to be properly understood.
