These stories chronicle the initiation of a young American male whose life experiences reveal-in a series of significant lessons-that in the context of the last half of the late twentieth century, the time our culture mythologizes as the idyllic seasons of one's youth is one of vulnerability, prone to tragedy and loss that teach the hard lessons of mortality. Evans's recurrent protagonist Sam leaves the familiar and heads out into the world, though he already bears the burden of loss. Traveling north, he learns to survive on his own in a challenging world while wrestling with the ethical dilemmas posed by the Vietnam war for young men of draft age. The source of the emotional and psychological scars that his experiences in that war leave is dramatically withheld until the penultimate story, "Baptism," and the river on which Sam travels in the final story evokes Hemingway's classic "Big Two-Hearted River," in which Nick struggles to stop his thoughts, to keep control, and to live deliberately in the moment. Green Seasons also features clear stylistic echoes of the master of crisp short sentences & pared down prose, though in crucial moments the style and imagery are allowed rise to a more lyrical plateau. Though the chronological time element provides a frame for Green Seasons, each story has decided closure; across the gaps between stories, however, character and imagery create cohesion, with recurrent references to blood providing the strongest and most dramatic thread.The stories that make up this work are chronological, yet they purposefully lack that causal spine and tight cohesion one expects in the novel, as well as the "what next?" feeling of a suspended plot that the reader experiences at the end of a novel's chapters. While some reviewers simply call such works collections of "interrelated stories," the most accurate label is perhaps "short story sequence," which not only draws attention to the dramatic and emotional arc of the volume as a whole but also reminds us that each unit possesses the firm closure that we expect from the short story-one of its chief pleasures. Nonetheless, though each story is autonomous, together they are more than the sum of their parts, resonating meaningfully with each other.To hazard some sort of definition, the short story sequence might be described as a volume of stories collected and organized by the author into an aesthetic whole, so that the reader successively realizes interrelationships between autonomous stories, underlying/ overarching patterns of organization and coherence, and thematic unity through a continual modification of his/her perceptions as the volume is read sequentially. Yet short story sequences vary markedly: some derive their unity from a common setting, a single narrator, a chronological order, a repeated protagonist, and/ or a group of characters. Others take place in varied locales, are told by a variety of narrators, jump around in time, and/or feature a variety of characters. In such cases, repeated motifs, common struggles, and/or thematic echoes may provide more subtle cohesion. Whatever the degree of coherence, the work ultimately remains discontinuous-sometimes even fragmented-making it an appropriate expression of our contemporary reality. Though the short story sequence form may be expressive of our lives today, its antecedents stretch back to our earliest narratives, related orally as the sagas of heroic figures in what have become the epics of a variety of cultures. Frame tales and story cycles appear frequently before the short story flourished as a genre, but the form as we know it today was launched in the nineteenth century as writers gathered related stories into published volumes, often linked by a common narrator or region. Dr. Robert M. LuscherUniversity of Nebraska at Kearney