Unlike Schappell’s prior collection, the brilliant Pen/Hemingway finalist “Use Me,’’ which focuses on one character, “Blueprints’’ weaves in and out of the lives of various women over decades. Like a Venn diagram, the stories overlap, with the happy surprise of finding some of the characters reappearing in other stories, older but not necessarily wiser.
At the center of the book is Charlotte, a kind of touchstone, whose college rape not only transforms her life, but casts shadows on the world of her friends, affecting their own choices. Charlotte is so traumatized, she can’t talk about what happened that night, and instead she simply vanishes. She reappears in “Are You Comfortable?’’ as a young woman struggling to communicate with her grandfather, who has Alzheimer’s. Later, in another story, while on the playground with her new friend Paige and their kids, she wrestles with opening up to a person who might hear and understand her. Charlotte’s saga causes ripples among her friends. In “Out of the Blue and into the Black,’’ college girl Belinda can’t get Charlotte and what happened to her out of her mind, even as she herself is no stranger to “battered party girl syndrome.’’ But Belinda recognizes the difficulties of change after any traumatic event, for both Charlotte and for herself. “Everybody forgets who they used to be, and they become better people, even though inside they’re exactly the same person,’’ Belinda says.
