Where Dreams Have Gone

Kim Fahner is the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

This collection of short stories enchants from start to finish. Norma
Harrs has filled these pages with vibrant characters and vignettes that
are made whole by the unexpected rhythms of life. The idea that strength
begins in one’s having faced adversity with determination is reflected
in pieces that range from the sublime to the mundane. In even the most
(seemingly) mundane situations, there is often times a lesson to be
learned.

In “Fertility Goddess,” a young girl falls in love with a married
man; the underlying lesson seems to be that everything in life is
transitory, so that once “when she looked up again, he was gone from
her sight.” The concept of appearances, of facades presented and
removed, is a recurrent theme in Harrs’s work. In “Streets, Avenues,
and Roads,” she writes of social difference and categorization in
Belfast. In the brilliantly witty “Fly Me to the Moon,” she
describes one woman’s voyage into the world of transvestites, playing
with the idea of visual facades and the revelation of what is hidden
behind each face, painted or not.

Much of the charm of Harrs’s writing rests on the knowledge that the
quirky, witty, unpredictable turns life takes can be so aptly transposed
to fictional worlds. Where Dreams Have Gone will have readers turning
the pages late into the night.