The twelve stories in Kate Blackwells debut collection illuminate the lives of men and women who appear as unremarkable as your next-door-neighbor until their lives explode quietly on the page. Her wry, often darkly funny voice describes the repressed underside of a range of middle-class characters living in the South. Blackwells focus is elemental-on marriage, birth, death, and the entanglements of love at all ages-but her gift is to shine a light on these universal situations with such lucidity, it is as if one has never seen them before.

In "My First Wedding," a twelve-year-old girl...