The Ocean Was Salt

These stories flow from a most touching recount of the Civil Rights Movement (“The Darling Buds of May” set in Oxford, MS) to a completely raucous tale of academia (“Belle’s Balls”). And the subject matter ranges as widely as the tone. For instance, in “Seeing It Through,” a woman diagnosed with cancer confronts and defeats her bumbling, uncaring doctor and the equally bumbling medical system in a surprisingly funny story. In “Feeling Salty,” a story that Sena Naslund especially praised for its insight into father-son relations, a divorced father is confronted by his angry teenager son in a spectacular way that oddly leaves both father and son closer. Shifting locale in “Out,” Cobb places two “Southern belle” friends in New York City and has them take on successive metropolitan playboys. And in a story of Alzheimer’s, “And the Word Was God,” we find a surprising and magical redemption. Whatever the mood, the constant running throughout Loretta Cobb’s first collection is a Southern voice that adeptly crosses sexual, economic, and age barriers to paint a picture of the South moving from the early sixties to the present. In doing so, Loretta Cobb has used a Southern motif and setting to move beyond rationality to encompass everyone’s problems.