Bob Kunzinger: K.P. Davis and the Strength of Women

Trust Issues: Stories by K.P. Davis

Cornerstone Press

Publication date: November, 2025

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The women in K.P. Davis’s collection, Trust Issues, are those rare sorts of characters who stay with me well after I finished reading their stories. Their strength—no, their persistence—inspires, and Davis’s poetic prose style brings them to life so that they join other literary friends of mine, like Alice Walker’s Celie or Alice Monro’s Carla, both women trying to escape their lives having lost trust in societal norms. Here, Davis’s creations are fraught to do the same. And Trust Issues ensures all readers easily find a relationship within the twenty brief narratives as the protagonists’ woven personalities and relatable struggles seamlessly unite their voices which echo far past the last page. 

The essence of this collection is the characters’ drive to be heard above the madness and despite the odds placed against them due to their lot in life. But Davis easily moves us along with a style of storytelling akin to Flannery O’Connor or Louisa May Alcott. Most notably is her keen sense of voice which calls out from these different women, all of whom remain authentic and somehow related by that drive to overcome; it’s as if Davis’s characters are cousins perhaps, with the author herself their guardian. In an interesting twist after a group of tales told in the third person, Davis abruptly shifts to first person yet does so with such smoothness that I went back to reread the other women’s journeys to see if I mistook the newest voice for someone else’s. I did not, and that shift makes me wonder with not just a little admiration if some personal narrative slipped into the fiction.  

In one piece, “Dreamy St. Maarten,” we are immediately treated to the first first-person participant voice, as she narrates, “I’m on the beach. It’s dark. Someone’s chasing me. I look over my shoulder and trip.” And we are off again in the throws of a young-woman’s attempt to balance her ambitions with her obligations. This time, however, her voice spins for us all, and Davis shifts the style as easily as she does the multiple plots. 

Trust Issues is a collection of stories as relevant today as any I have read. In a world of a million voices reeling at the same time for space, for the slightest increase of volume, these women wake us up with their whispering determination. Read this work not only because of the stories but because of how they are told, a rare treat in this time where authorship is often in question. 

Copyright 2026 Bob Kunzinger

Bob Kunzinger is the author of 13 volumes of nonfiction. He reads throughout the world at Literature Festivals, Workshops, Conferences, Senior Facilities, Universities, High Schools, and Pubs. Mostly pubs.