Anika Nailah is the director of Books Of Hope, a Massachusetts-based "literacy empowerment project" that encourages teenagers to express themselves by writing and self-publishing their books. So it seems odd that Nailah's own literary debut would come through a major publisher like Doubleday. But her work with troubled youth explains a lot about the content and direction of the 14 short pieces in her debut anthology, Free, And Other Stories. Nailah writes with an activist's earnest intentions and, in a few cases, with a high-school counselor's mawkish awkwardness. In particular, the book's opening story, "Trudy," is stilted and sanctimonious in its point-of-view-jumping portrait of a racially loaded encounter between a black cashier and a malicious, self-righteous white customer in Boston, circa 1954. Most of the book is subtler; while race is virtually always an issue for Free's protagonists, whose skin colors Nailah generally describes in terms of food or drink (cinnamon, almond, fudgesicle, caramel, milk chocolate, coffee, cream soda), not all the situations they find themselves in are so symbolically forced. Some of the stories—like "Inside Out" and "French," which deal directly with racial identify and assimilation, or "The Ride," which confronts inherited racism and power issues—are a bit too obvious or strident. But in other cases, Nailah displays a hidden talent for quiet subversion. In "Professor," one of her most challenging stories, she depicts a homeless alcoholic who joins a crowd of proud, kente-clad activists at a lecture given by a charismatic black speaker, then retreats outside to watch them and compare their reaction to his own. Nailah's several stories regarding parental separation and familial loss are similarly observational rather than preachy. Her prose is spare and minimalist: sometimes staccato, sometimes poetic. Her best stories are soothing, perhaps unintentionally so, as even the most emotionally prickly ones tend to reach lyrical, soporific endings. As a result, Free is pleasant and poignant enough, but for all its internal melodramas and racial confrontations, it summons up few authentic tensions. It's as though Nailah is trying to prod her readers toward social awareness in a non-threatening manner. The tactic is likely to work better on her students than on her literary audience.