Lunar Landing. (Original stories)

The characters in these five stories are confronted with forces, internal as well as external, that are either beyond their comprehension or beyond their control: a young boy struggles to understand his friendship with a girl who has brought him to the verge of sexual awareness; a couple are thrust into both parenthood and grief when their orphaned nephew comes to live with them; a mother and her sons, on the run from religious fanaticism, find their home the site of a supernatural phenomenon; at Christmastime, a frustrated teacher is enticed by memory back to the school where she once taught; in the title story, a boy's faith in the mysteries of Catholicism is threatened when all the rules he has been learning suddenly seem to have changed. In the realm of the everyday, a small event or an unexpected discovery can make history, can indeed be a lunar landing.