Groff's story about two children abandoned on an island - tells us all we need to know and no more

Good story from Lauren Groff, Dog Says Wolf, in current NYer, and what's especially good about this story - of two young girls (ages 7 and 4?) abandoned on an island in a Florida lake or swamp - is what it doesn't say or do. Who in their right mind would leave two young girls on a deserted island? We get only glimpses of the girls' mother and of their life with her up to that point, all from the girls' POV, but it's enough to know that she was unstable, unsettled, possibly an addict - we don't see any more than the girls themselves could describe or understand. So the mother, current boyfriend, and the 2 girls are on this island as some kind of rustic vacation?, hideaway, getaway? and the mom tells them she''s got to leave them for a while but she'll be back - and she doesn't come back. The girls at that point are left alone on the island for several days, and they manager to survive as the food, water, and other resources diminish. Could it happen? They're amazingly sanguine and improbably resourceful, but then again from what we know of their lives up to that point they've probably had to fend for themselves much more than most children. Groff keeps us completely engaged with these two children and their struggle to survive - and she avoids a melodramatic or surreal conclusion. Interestingly, there's one paragraph toward the end that gives us just a glimpse of the future lives of these two children - and that's enough, it opens the story into a new dimension, it's as if a beam of light shining for a moment on this dark passage. There are horrendous, villainous adults involved in this story, but they're kept on the periphery, and Groff resolutely tells us only what the children see and on what we need to know, without weighing the story down w/ needless narrative, such as the details on the lives of the adults and of the eventual, inevitable rescue. This story tells us all we need to know and no more. 


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