These two short novels, written at an interval of thirty years, combine to reveal the centrality of young women and sisters in the fiction of Young. Joseph and Mary: A Family Romance is set in Phoenix in 1978 and Rec Park: A Small-Town Romance in a coastal community outside of Los Angeles in the early years of the twenty-first century. Young omits nothing sexual, harsh, or aberrant, but the modesty and lyricism of his style safeguards against mere sensationalism.