Sarah Foles: A Short Story Collection by Travis Lee provides rich social commentary
Reviewed by Pennell PaughMarch 22, 2026 (San Diego) -- San Diego author Travis Lee has released a collection of short stories currently displayed in the City of San Diego Author Showcase.
Sarah Foles (A Short Story Collection) contains a variety of stories including one about an ex-military man who loses a leg in an accident. After his discharge, the military pays for his education. In college he is more mature than the other students. Though he is in his late 20s he is attracted to a 17-year-old female student in “Sarah Foles.”
A grandson plans to save his grandmother who is being kept in an Alzheimer's home against her will in “Harry's Goodbye.”
A divorced man teaches his pre-schooler to steal packages from peoples’ front yards in “Jake & Junior.”
All Lee’s stories provide rich social commentary. Every story caused me to stop and think to fully understand and appreciate its underlying message. It’s an ideal gift to share and discuss with friends.
Below is an excerpt from the first story, “Sarah Foles:”
“The coffee burned.
“That’s not how I usually explain it, when people ask why I’m a twenty-nine-year-old college freshman. I just tell them what happened: one morning on the way to work, a truck veered across the median and the sky and the ground switched places. I don’t mention the coffee.
“But the coffee is what I remember most because it burned.
***
“I’ve had a lot of near-misses over the years, and it’s like I told my junior sailors: take care of your brakes. They’ll save you, especially in morning base traffic.
“The morning that claimed my left leg from the knee down, it was raining and traffic was light. One carrier was out doing quals and mine had special lib. I’d only come to base to retrieve my camera from the berthing.
“The driver of the truck didn’t have his headlights on. By the time I saw him, he was barreling towards me.
“My brakes didn’t help. When I swerved, I flipped twice before he hit me. “While I lay there in my rearranged world, burning from the coffee, the driver kept going.
“Phillip Boyce, a thirty-two-year-old accountant from Virginia Beach, he’d been cited for drunk driving twice. Cops said he was going seventy when he hit me and he maintained that speed as he crossed the other lanes and slammed into a tree.
“His steering wheel punched through his chest.
“As I lay there burning, awaiting my two new friends, a metal leg and a thick cane, Phillip Boyce was dead.”
Travis Lee is the author of Kale & Jason, Tear Sin, The Seven Year Laowai, The Journey through Nanking and Grandpa & Henry. His fiction has appeared in The Colored Lens and Independent Ink Magazine, among other places.
To learn more about the author, visit: http://www.travis-lee.org