Two Romances

These two short novels, written at an interval of thirty years, combine to reveal the centrality of young women and sisters in the fiction of Young. Joseph and Mary: A Family Romance is set in Phoenix in 1978 and Rec Park: A Small-Town Romance in a coastal community outside of Los Angeles in the early years of the twenty-first century. Young omits nothing sexual, harsh, or aberrant, but the modesty and lyricism of his style safeguards against mere sensationalism.