The Servitude of Love — Diane Glancy

Love in one form or another is the commanding force of this new collection of short fiction. The Servitude of Love holds the revelations of love in different manifestations--love of work, love of another, love of journey, love of mission, love of justice, of foolishness, of duty. These thirteen stories take place along the north/south corridor of the central plains of America, in Afghanistan and Spain. Fictional characters such as Noe in Brownsville, Texas in the first story, and actual historical characters such as Joanna the Mad in 16th century Spain in the last story, speak of the difficulties and demands of love. Noe, subsumed by love for his family and his art, imagines The Maker, El Senor, to be a workman like himself. Joanna, madly in love with her husband, finds she must live without him. Minneola Peavine, in a dull marriage in West Texas, dreams of nightly visits with Genghis Khan. The four daughters of a preacher travel the north shore in Minnesota in search of something other than the cold. A dyslectic boy reverses the letters, p and b. Another boy, Malchas, loses his ear in an accident involving fireworks, and begins to hear the faraway sea. There is an experimental story about land rights told in several voices in several versions. Two brothers serve in Afghanistan. Two other brothers deliver pizza in northwest Kansas once inhabited by Indians and cavalry troops. The historical, Sister Maria Jesus de Agreda, bilocates between 17th century Spain and the Jumano tribe in the American southwest. Most of them are awash in a river of circumstances that could drown them.