They arrived by Mustang, by marriage, by hitchhiking. The characters in Marjorie Hudson's story collection, "Accidental Birds of the Carolinas," have strayed -- like vagrant birds -- from familiar territory to reach a transfiguring moment in their lives.

In "The Clearing," a husband's affair inspires his wife to buy a farmhouse in fictional Ambler County, N.C. After fire ravages her new home, she clings to her nearly destroyed "precious loneliness" returning to the safety of the "ruined house, open to the meadow on one side."

In "The High Life," Dip's 15th birthday is celebrated with five-card stud and tequila. Later that night, Dip's boss, Royal, urges him to lose his virginity to Royal's passed-out girlfriend. Royal, Dip's deeply flawed father figure, coaxes him to: "Go ahead and do it. She don't care. We're family."

Many of Hudson's narratives explore themes of family -- found, invented or inherited -- navigating the often suffocating nature of belonging, or the catastrophes of reinvention. Her prose is evocative. A river's "edges were velvety with ice," the faint image of a painted-over mandala looks like "a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall." In several stories, though, attention to plot and character is less compelling.

"The Outside World" is thematically ambitious, attempting to describe the start and dissolution of love, but ultimately, the novella meanders in vague, unsatisfying directions. John and Jolene fall quickly in love. He takes her virginity watching her "with the sweetest expression she had ever seen on a man." When Jolene announces her pregnancy, "John was more loving than before."

The sentimental tone of their courtship dissolves when life gets hard, but not for any discernible reason. There are financial troubles, their son is diagnosed with Down syndrome, and Jolene's second pregnancy ends in miscarriage, but the narration fails to establish in what ways these disappointments are exacting their particular toll on John and Jolene. Hudson does not explain why these two sincere characters, whose investment in each other's lives she's described at great lengths, are not more supportive of one another when faced with tragedy.

Contradictory qualities can coexist in the same narrative -- they certainly coexist in people -- but why characters make choices is as important as the decisions that they make. There were moments when I longed for Hudson's distinctive voice to guide me deeper into the heart of her characters, because she proved early on in her debut that she is a writer who knows how: capable of probing the common injuries of love and loss to arrive at surprising insights, confessions and richly human truths.

Kathryn Savage's work has appeared in the Village Voice, City Pages and Metro Magazine.