Teenreads.com -- SHIRLEY, Volume 1 by Kaoru Mori

Victorian gentlewoman Bennet Cranley is the competent, cheerful proprietor of a café. She manages, most of the time, to weather her peers' disapproval of a single woman nearing 30 running a business and, heaven forbid, showing little interest in being married to a suitable gentleman with a kind smile. The only problem is that, with working all day and collapsing into a weary puddle at night, her house has descended into a bit of a mess.

When 13-year-old Shirley Madison answers her hasty advertisement for a maid, Bennet is skeptical of her skills, not to mention the wisdom of hiring someone so young. But she is unable to turn away such a sincere young woman. The tales that follow give glimpses into both Bennet and Shirley's daily life --- from the joy of receiving a present to the quiet moments of reflection on life's choices and fates.

After the initial tales following Shirley, Kaoru Mori rounds out the collection with a number of vignettes of Victorian servants and their various masters --- from an impetuous young five-year-old lord to an elderly gentleman given to playing pranks on his staff to while away the loneliness of his old age.

As with her long series Emma, Mori has a keen sense of how to show off everyday moments for laughs and drama, as well as how to let people's expressions and mood speak for themselves without needing anyone to natter on to provide exposition. Her trust in the reader's ability to pick up on subtlety is one of the things that makes all of her work so engaging, inviting her audience in a private world. As in Emma, her art gives characters deceptively simple faces while allowing all the period details of costume and environment to shine. Her love of period details never hides or overwhelms the bright humanity in all of her characters, however, and this volume is almost a light-hearted valentine to the period when compared with the more serious, complicated romance key to Emma's success.

These short stories are earlier works, and show Mori growing as an artist and storyteller. But anyone looking for more of her charming view into Victorian England will be thrilled with this anthology.

--- Reviewed by Robin Brenner

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