In her debut collection, Carol Edwards interlaces a narrative of characters bearing up under the weight of longing, loss, and regret. She unfolds, with reassuring tenderness, a spectrum of experiences: from stolen innocence to wasted time; from insidious monsters to bittersweet loneliness; from the heaviness of broken hearts to the hope of belonging. She concludes with a short story—a fairy tale, of sorts—to capture in prose themes woven throughout the poems.