NOUVELLE SOUL by Barbara Summers (Amistad...

NOUVELLE SOUL by Barbara Summers (Amistad Press: $8.95; 247 pp.). Summers’ stories are set in middle-class neighborhoods in New York, the Eastern Seaboard and Paris; her characters’ relationships are complicated by questions of social mobility and deeply ingrained racial attitudes. Some of the most affecting stories are told from multiple viewpoints, including “Free Skies,” an account of the first Afro-American woman stunt pilot. A blend of strength and humor gives these stories a rare appeal. As three daughters clear out years of their mother’s accumulated junk in “Nothing Like Daddy,” one reflects, “Black women always last to give up. We just don’t know how. Mother to the world even if we’re a single mother. If we collapse, the world collapses. Women running the world and got to carry it too.”