This anthology, like the woman in the photograph that inspired it, is both multifaceted
and engaging. Kennedy and Cummins have done a brilliant job of gathering together
an extraordinary collection of stories, poems, and essays that captures prismatic
glimpses into the fictional essence of The Girl with Red Hair. She is one
of many human-like dolls in Lance Olsen’s magical realism story “The
Short Time of Smiling.” For poet H.L. Hix, she is “Marie, Beside the
River”—a metaphor for the youth we were “long ago.” In the
short story, “The Lilies of Wolf Creek,” Susan Tekulve paints her as
a young woman grieving the cancer death of her mother, angry with the father she
believes has moved on. In “Other People’s Problems,” Ladette Randolph
imagines her a tyrannized wife escaping a rotten marriage...or life—which
is it? And she is the enviably restored corpse in Laura McCullough’s poem,
“What We Want.” Whether she’s a “cougar” with kids,
a “Red Desdemona,” or being “rearranged in bed,” The Girl
with Red Hair definitely evokes the term temptress and, like a temptress, makes
for an irresistible read.