Winner fo the Utah Arts Council award for fiction in 1990, Elegies and Love Songs explores, with a writerly skill matched only by its depth and sensitivity, lives and problems situated largely in the Great Basin area of the West but universally human in scope and meaning.
An innovative look at often manipulative relationships, Elegies covers the range of emotions from the absurd to the comic and from the merely poignant to the pathetic. Readers will identify with the unorthodox in human nature where Mrgaret Young's use of the intuitive twists plots in surprisingly odd, yet strangely familiar ways. The immediacy of her style coaxes readers to accept the unexpected as a familiar aspect of daily living.
Young packs her stories with details of the extraordinary interactions of semingly ordinary people—a woman cares for her ex-husband's grandmother, a teenager keeps a journal about her father's experience with cancer. Characters such as these cope in unique ways with the frustrations of skewed relationships and the hardships of death and dying. Young's fresh perspectives on age-old themes subtly challenge readers to question their own assumptions about love, life, and death. [from dust jacket]
1992 Short Fiction Award, Association for Mormon Letters