At 113 pages, Janet Thornburg’s Rhubarb Pie is about as skinny a story collection as you’ll find, but what this debut collection lacks in length it makes up for in charm. The book opens with the story of a lesbian from San Francisco who lands in Willa Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, for an annual conference celebrating the life and work of the famously unfriendly writer. Jeanette Pierce quickly regrets her choice of community housing for the conference when she realizes she’s staying next door to a hair salon. Pierce gets caught up in a madcap adventure involving the hairdresser, a cheating husband, an angry housewife named Imogene, and a gift of rhubarb pie. This opening story ends with a leave-taking–the newly independent Imogene gets the haircut Willa Cather purportedly had when she left Red Cloud–and heads for San Francisco. These narratives come full-circle when, in the final story, a pregnant woman boards the California Zephyr, headed East.

My favorite story of the bunch is “First Date,” about a man who goes to pick up his young son Ben from a play date in Bernal Heights, only to discover that Ben is wearing a pink tu-tu with which he is reluctant to part, and his friend Alexander has two moms. At one point, Mr. Straight-and-Narrow ends up nearly concussed in a bathroom with Ron, Alexander’s biological father, while Ben frantically searches the house for his stuffed animal, Clarence. “What could I do? I was bleeding like a stuck pig. Clarence was lost. Ben and I were stranded in the house of homosexuals, and that’s just how it was.”

This book is pure San Francisco, much of it taking place in Thornburg’s own neighborhood, Noe Valley. Lesbian moms figure as frequently here as middle-aged housewives do in the work of Alice Munro. These are characters who will be familiar to most Bay Area readers, because they sound a lot like one’s neighbors…and a lot like oneself.

One period piece does break the Bay Area mold. In Split Shift, set in pioneering days, a young woman who has escaped an abusive husband seeks shelter among her co-workers at a restaurant. One of these co-workers, her lover, eventually pays a high price to make the murderous husband disappear. The exchange of money reveals that the ex-husband views his wife as nothing more than property, while her new partner is willing to sacrifice everything to save her life. Like the characters in Cather’s O Pioneers and My Antonia, Thornburg’s heroines are also breaking ground.

What’s best about these stories is that Thornburg keeps the reader guessing, and characters tend to make unexpected moves that somehow fit with the overall pattern of the stories. There’s also a sly humor running through the collection, and I found myself laughing aloud on several occasions. The book is released by Thunderegg, a co-op based in San Francisco and Eugene, OR.