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Life with Others: Pete Mladinic’s Review of Carla, Swept Away by Casey Robb
Life with Others: A Review of Carla, Swept Away by Casey Robb
Taken as a whole, this collection of ten stories takes readers on a journey through imagination, through places and times that reflect the world author Casey Robb and her readers live in. Stories of lived lives—they keep readers on edge, turning the page to find out what happens next. A reader comes to the end of any one of these stories thinking, yes, that really happened to people I know or to me. Detailed settings, complex characters, suspenseful plots, and well-crafted sentences make these stories memorable. Diverse in mood- funny, sad, filled with drama- they rank among the best short stories in contemporary fiction.
There’s a lot of darkness in “Carla, Swept Away,” the title story, with its dark ground and dark sky. The reader follows the story from a rural Texas coastal town to the seawall in Galveston, where it ends. It begins with a young girl, Sarah, outside her home during a storm that, to Sarah, is more exhilarating than threatening.
The storm is blowing in all black and swirly. I am dancing in the street, twirling, like the clouds. Carla has arrived. Her wind lashes my back, my yellow slicker flapping like a feral thing. Her skies let go. Heavy drops hammer my cheeks like marbles. The distant ditch is spilling dark water across the county road. The murky stream steals up our street and drowns our lawn.
The story revolves around the death of Sarah’s younger sister, Allie, killed close to home by a hit-and-run driver. At the end, in Galveston, Sarah’s father swims offshore and rescues her mother, who has gone out too far. While the family’s grief is at the heart of the story, the writer, who has been there, brings it to life. Her protagonist, Sarah, takes the reader back to the early 1960s, to her region of Texas, to the roadside ditch where Allie lost her life.
Whether Rusty will ever get out of the cave alive is the big question in “The Devil’s Grip.”
He could go no farther. His reaching arms were stuck, and his legs stretched way down, unable to push or pull. His sweating hands twisted and turned, but couldn’t dislodge his chest. The earth had him in a vise.
He had gone into the cave to retrieve a barrette that Sissy, Rusty’s older brother Tate’s girlfriend, had lost there on a previous venture into the cave, Rusty’s “special” place. The central scene, Rusty alone in the cave, is the story’s climax, the height of its conflict. It is then and there that Rusty gains an inner strength that will allow him to go further in life and will take him to Sul Ross State University to fulfill his aspirations of becoming a geologist, and consequently urge Tate, an auto mechanic, to study to be what he wants to be, an engineer. The cave, The Devil’s Grip, is the metaphor of motivation in Rusty’s journey.
In “He’s a Rebel,” Sarah and her friend Angela want to be Cher, the singer, half of the duo Sonny and Cher. Angela, tall and dark, even looks like Cher. She has Cher’s bangs and, slightly older than Sarah, a boyfriend. At school, she urges Sarah to meet a guy, Frankie, whose allure vanishes the moment Sarah enters his dirty, unkempt house, where he lives with his often-absent mother. Unbeknownst to Sarah, Frankie has a girlfriend. She arrives at his house with four other girls, and she and Sarah fight. Sarah thinks Frankie planned it all so trouble would happen. He is not a nice guy, and he lives in a bad home. At the end of the story, in her own home, she says:
“Well, I’m only going to say one thing.” I shook my head. “I’m glad I have a dad.” He gave me a puzzled smile. “And a mom.” “Wow,” Mom said.
Sarah’s epiphany is that the person she wants to be is herself.
Other stories are equally rewarding. “Baba Yaga at the Toy Store” is about a young girl’s encounter with a survivor of the Holocaust. “The Rabbit Trap” involves racism in the Deep South. “The Piano Man” is set against the backdrop of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. In “Tiger, Tiger,” the protagonist, a Vietnam vet, has guilt-filled flashbacks on a plane during a storm. “The Fruit Dish Finds Nandi” takes readers down to the Yucatán in Mexico. “Valentine’s Day” is a romantic comedy of errors. “You Takin’ Me to Paisley, or What? ” is a story about a young woman who is a hippie hitchhiker and an elderly man, recently widowed, who lives in a travel trailer, and it ends with an ironic twist. Each story is a journey, one readers will want to take, and take again.
Carla, Swept Away is available on Amazon ($12.99 paper, $3.99 Kindle).
Copyright © 2026 Peter Mladinic
All Rights ReservedPeter Mladinic was born and raised in New Jersey. He graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1973 and earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas in 1985. Professor emeritus at New Mexico Junior College, where he was a member of the English faculty for 30 years. During that time, he was a board member of the Lea County Museum and president of the Lea County Humane Society. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, USA. Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, Maiden Rock, is available from UnCollected Press.
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