These are stories of awakening, but not in the "rite of passage" sense so familiar to American fiction. Here we awaken from the dream of the life we've been living purposefully for a long time. The five stories of The Beauty of Their Youth give a pointed precision to an insight that haunts Joyce Hinnefeld's fine novels, namely, that mistaken perceptions and misguided decisions, rather than tragic flaws that must destroy us, are inextricably part of the ordinary texture of our lives. Our flaws, not foreign or ultimately even "wrong," are intimately at home among the characteristic peculiarities that define our humanity. This is a vision that understands without excusing, joining the past self to the future self, and one person to another, in a community in which we share responsibility for the stories that we tell.