In Anne Baldo's Morse Code for Romantics, patterns of life emergeand breakin relationships both requited and otherwise. A restaurateur orchestrates a devious punishment for his wife's lover. A desperate mother searches for her missing daughter, a modern-day Persephone who was lured away by a sinister boyfriend. An islander falls under the spell of a visiting researcher, whose insidious smiles and natural sangfroid mirror the serpent-like sea monster he hunts.
These wistful, darkly surreal stories, set in Southern Ontario, suggest that maternal instinct is not just a chemical lie but something bloody and painful; that one person's clouds can rain on generations; and that true loneliness can be as clear as code written on a face, and as ominous as a dark, monstrous shape lurking beneath the surface.
For the most part, these are standalone stories--the exceptions are a handful in which characters reappear--but they're linked by geography, by recurring imagery, and themes which make this collection such a satisfying book. They're linked too by being crafted to a standard of real excellence, and I'm thinking of the image on the book's cover, of the power lines connecting the utility poles, without which I'd probably be employing a metaphor right now along the lines of beads on a string, one gleaming gem right after another.
'Throughout, Baldo's prose shines. Her writing effectively evokes a world that is familiar and strange at the same time, pulling the reader into lives scarred by loss and loneliness. These are poignant, wise, memorable stories by a writer whose vision may be bleak, but it's a vision that rings true on every page.'