This is Ramona Dearing’s debut collection, but she’s no novice. She’s made the requisite appearances in the literary mags and been flagged by Oberon’s Coming Attractions. Since 1997, she’s been in Best Canadian Stories three times.

Dearing works for CBC Radio in St. John’s, and, like the national broadcaster, So Beautiful’s 13 stories cover the country from Newfoundland and Labrador to Vancouver. They are stylistically strong, their characters nuanced and absolutely credible. There’s plenty of humour and wit here, but also an edginess, a sense of lurking danger. Each story unfolds like a puzzle. Often near its heart lies a family preoccupied with its own disintegration, and the children forgotten or dragged behind the wreckage.

This theme is picked up in one of the collection’s most powerful stories, “An Apology,” about a Christian Brother’s protracted trial for long-ago sexual crimes against orphaned and abandoned boys under his charge. Now in his 60s, he is shocked at the “filth” of the accusations. He is a respectable man. His accusers are all alcoholics or drug addicts, in and out of mental hospitals, their lives broken and destroyed. How could they be right and he wrong? With meticulous subtlety, Dearing shifts our perception of the man’s guilt.

Often what Dearing writes about here is the inability or unwillingness to trust – a word synonymous, perhaps, with love. Many of her characters, struggling with habits of denial and self-delusion, are not particularly trustworthy or lovable. Yet she renders them in ways that are always charged and sometimes surprising. And occasionally, miraculously, trust and truth meet.