Astonishing Women: Stories and Tidbits

Delacroix is an old story teller. "Astonishing Women: Stories and Tidbits" is his fourth book of stories, counting a volume in French and another written under a pen name. In "Astonishing Women...." Delacroix collects stories about women that left a lasting impression on him. His mother and his wife are in it, of course, but so are women he barely knew, and others whose names he never learned.

All the women in the stories had an effect on him -- however slight, however ephemeral -- specifically because they were women and because he is man. The book thus gathers a male human being's disparate observations of women scattered throughout a lifetime. The author weaves these observation into anecdotes, complete with their rich background, and he restitutes these in a distinctively masculine voice.

The narrative of "Astonishing Women...." is far from passive. In some cases, it's ambiguous whether the "astonishing" in the title slyly refers to the author's being astonished by women or to the author's astonishing women.

The stories take place during the last forty years, in different parts of the world where Delacroix's eventful life took him: California where he lives with his wife, a painter, Latin America, Africa, Brittany, and other parts of his native France, Greece, Turkey, and others.

The "Tidbits" in the title refer to small contributions from his teenage granddaughter, from his daughter when she was herself a teenager, and to several poems the author wrote for his wife.

It's worth mentioning, perhaps, that stories explicitly about women written by men are not an overcrowded genre in these culturally fearful twenty-first century United States of America.