"Don't judge a book by its cover" is an old saying, but in this case, very apt. Cover art has evolved over the last decade, and small press books are now as attractively packaged as their large press rivals. The problem remains that the cover can sometimes give a false impression of the book's content, as has happened with this short story collection. The cover is bright with happy children:Emma's Hands shows a bucolic scene of two young girls running around a tree in a sunlit garden. Would it not be unreasonable to expect for the stories within to have some cheer and sweetness, some joie de vivre? And yet, the book doesn't contain children who have anything to smile about. Instead, they grow up to be angry, even self-destructive adults. This is not to say that these stories aren't worth reading, but the false impression given by the covers is irritating.
Mary Swan won first prize in the 2002 O. Henry Awards for her novella The Deep which was subsequently published as a book. Emma's Hands is her first collection of short fiction. Her style is slow paced, dark in vision, with a touch of horror. Swan's characters are haunted and often speechless beings. Their fates are pre-determined by family genetics, like Emma's in the title story:

"Emma's hands are baby hands now, generic, and it's impossible to say whose they resemble. Impossible to guess what her fingers will look like, holding a glass, touching her cheek, adorned with silver rings. But her thumbnail is my father's, broad and flat and quite distinct, appearing also in one sister, another's son. It should be possible to trace that thumbnail back, to trace it like a mouth, like the shape of an eye, like a talent for music."

In "The Manual of Remote Sensing" the narrator is a travel agent who separates from her husband Martin after she learns of his infidelity. She recalls her first love affair with Hart, a young American she met while staying at a youth hostel in Munich. The affair ended badly and in a strange twist, the narrator denies that any of it happened at all, leaving the reader wondering about the narrator's honesty with herself .. Swan's stories often have little dialogue which reinforce the feeling of alienation between the characters. One of the best, "1917"", reads like a prose poem. It evokes with vivid details the experiences of Canadian nurses and other women living in France during the war.
Swan, like Melanie Little, is adept at playing with time sequences. The present isn't as important as memories. Yellowed photographs and clippings engender some of her tales of woe. "By the Sea, by the Sea" is a reconstruction of the sensational news story of Mary McIntyre who was born with a deformed spine, and became a victim of incest. Her parents take her to Ostend, France, reputed for its healing waters at the turn of the century. The narrator tells Mary's story because "someone should know about Mary McIntyre, but no one ever will." The contemporary "Max, 1970", about the relationship of a teenage son and his sick father, plunges into the incomprehensible. This is one of the weakest in the fourteen stories. "On the Border" is set in a kibbutz near Jerusalem and is well wrought, though the characters are overwrought beings, who grate on the reader's sense of the credible. Leah is an elderly widow who believes she once shot a prisoner and is convinced that he is coming after her:

"Next door in Leah's room it was already stuffy, and very hot. A tall candle burned in the kitchen, the only light. Kjerstin climbed on a chair and began trying fuses. Leah's wild-haired shadow danced on the wall. With the sound of each flare rising she jumped and twitched.
I hate the noise,' she said. I hate that noise. Like the war, like all the wars, with the big guns pounding at night. Yoav is gone and no one can help me now, he'll find me now.'"

The irony of this story is that the reader doesn't know whether Leah's terror kills her, or whether she is murdered.
Emma's Hands comes with a recommendation on the back cover by Alice Munro. Some of the stories take place in a farmhouse in Ontario, which is Munro's landscape, but Swan's writing skills don't compare to Munro's. Even her best, like "Spanish Grammar", a story of disappointed love set in Spain, lacks emotional authenticity, though it does possess a certain authentic local colour.
Emma's Hands is marked by a dark vision of life that should have been reflected on the covers, to alert the reader who may not want to delve into the drama of despair.