Barbara Sutton's quirky debut collection tracks the emotional journeys of characters struggling to find harmonious relationships with the people they are expected to love and be loved by. All too often, for Sutton's characters, such supposedly sacred relationships disappoint. In the end, it is not the loved ones who are loved, but the strangers met through chance encounters—the interim mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, husbands and wives. Such unlikely friendships weave their way through Sutton's stories and create sometimes funny and sometimes tragic reflections on the accidental and often fleeting nature of love.

Through Sutton's vibrant voices we meet a memorable and varied cast of characters, all suffering the same fate. From the adolescent Marta, who finds a substitute for her absent mother and father in her grandmother's improbable and eccentric relationship with the parish priest, to the emotionally unstable, unemployed Virginia Woolf scholar who finds kinship with a belligerent, equally unstable, nine-year-old boy, Sutton delivers authentic scenes of severe isolation coupled with brief moments of resplendent harmony. It is these transitory moments, these glimpses into the elusive world of light, that manage to sustain our hope.

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Sutton knows how to convey those mysterious transitional moments when the familiar grows suddenly strange. These tightly crafted, tough and true stories show characters 'waiting for fries at the Beckettian drive-through,' struggling with the inescapable strains of daily life, here presented by a writer who knows how to deliver the goods.

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From the opening pages of Barbara Sutton's collection I had the exhilarating sense of being in the presence of a remarkable new voice: wicked, pungent, exquisitely intelligent, wildly humorous. And each successive story only served to deepen my admiration for this writer's originality and for her empathy with a startlingly wide range of characters: old and young, drunk and sober, male and female, naive and cynical. The Send-Away Girl is a splendidly accomplished debut.

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Sutton's 10 tales display an absolutely wild sense of humor, running the gamut from witty erudition to outright silliness. . . . Each story is made vivid by Sutton's fierce intelligence, captivating dialogue, and unique scenarios. . . . Fresh and funny stories.

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The pretext for these stories is to entertain; their subtext is to make readers think. Sutton accomplishes both.