Yellow is, as Alexander Theroux has written, a colour “with a thousand meanings.” Connoting both glory and disturbing estrangement, it contains, Theroux contends, an opposing duality.

This duality is central to Flying to Yellow, a debut collection of stories by children’s author Linda Holeman. Though the book consists of stories that are firmly rooted in the quotidian, it ends in the miraculous. It is concerned, as its epigraph suggests, with what it takes “to be a woman in this life”: the stories its female protagonists tell themselves and each other are tools for survival. The book’s world is largely one of averted gazes, obliqueness, silence, and loss. Death and illness stalk its pages, but they are countered, particularly in the latter part of the book, by stories of forgiveness, love, and redemption.

In the title story, “Flying to Yellow,” a young woman is asked by her sister-in-law Myrna to visit her institutionalized daughter after Myrna’s death. Both women understand that the request is something that would not be fulfilled by either of their spouses. The women’s tentative bond is set against an estrangement from their men, who “don’t want to know nothing if it’s got to do with … a woman’s business,” as Myrna puts it.

Estrangement turns up in various forms in the ensuing stories: the distances between people are traced in all their variety. Throughout, the style is terse, spartan: the world abrades, the atmosphere is dry and hot, breath is held. The symbolic movement of the first part of the book is a kind of descent into an underworld of selfhood, a landscape that is often laid to waste.

The nadir is reached in “Lilyrose,” in which a young mother, Judith, confesses that she can’t “find the right way to love [her] daughter.” Judith watches her daughter comfort a stuffed toy: “Mommy loves you Judith,” she says. This inversion, a child mothering a toy named after a seemingly unloving parent, marks the turning point of the collection.

The remaining five stories are all concerned in some way with reconciliation. “The Orange” demonstrates extraordinary control and is deeply moving: in short, uninflected sentences, a young woman describes an encounter with a potential molester.

The final story, “Sighs for Lila,” is almost a fairy tale and pleasingly so. A young girl is removed from her father’s house after inventing a story about him with sexual implications of which she is wholly unaware. It is only by speaking magic words, by acknowledging the incident to him years later, that the woman is freed from her burden and able to realize her father’s patient, unspoken love.

In the title story, Myrna has noticed that fishflies prefer to land on “cabins painted yellow,” which the narrator calls “gravitating towards something that you know feels right.” The larger movement of flight in this book is from shame to forgiveness, and from solitude to love. Yellow appears, finally, to be a kind of grace. Flying to Yellow has a hard-won and undeniable power.