Four stories into Liberation Day, I was feeling pretty glum. For all of their characteristic close attention to the individuality of their protagonists, all of those first four are pretty much total downers in their focus on unredeemed bad systems ("Liberation Day"), people ("The Mom of Bold Action") and both ("A Thing at Work"), with "Love Letter", which I'd read before, the only partial exception and one of Saunders' weaker stories that I've read in its more or less overt Trump referencing and simplicity of polemic.
Then "Sparrow", which would've been a gift at any time, but especially after what came before it. I've read a lot of Saunders' thoughts on how he writes stories, and in "Sparrow" he turns that approach to what gradually reveals itself as a love story with a happy ending.
There's further range in the rest of the collection - notes of revolution ("Ghoul" and "Elliott Spencer") and emotional reckoning ("Mother's Day"), and the different-again tone of "My House". And through it all, that human-ness and sense of a gaze that, if not always forgiving exactly, is able to see people in some sense through their own eyes and as they might want to be seen, without forsaking the moral intelligence that always animates Saunders' writing. I doubt he'll ever touch Tenth of December - both for what it is and when I read it - but he sure is good and this latest is ample argument for that.
