If exceptional creative powers and mental instability are sometimes linked, Janet Frame would seem to be a stunning example of a troubling symmetry: giftedness in danger of being sundered by powerful personal turmoil. The New Zealand native (1924-2004) managed to achieve literary acclaim by producing what became award-winning writing all the while coping with heavy personal burdens -- as in labeled a schizophrenic when a young adult and consigned eight years to a mental institution. Discovery of her exceptional literary skills is said to have freed her just in time to avoid a possible lobotomy, and a subsequent psychiatric re-examination reportedly indicated she’d been misdiagnosed originally.

An attribution in The Literary Encyclopedia to Frame’s “commitment to marginality” seems validated within some pieces in this collection, yet sheer creativity and mastery of form abound no matter the possible links to her life challenges. Contrasts in subject and tone are common, as in memory-evoked descriptions of children bored and restless at the end of a hot, hot summer of idleness ("The Reservoir") contrasted with a puzzlingly intriguing parable of life and death ("Two Sheep").

The title story, "Prizes," may be strongly self-revelatory but seems capable of engaging a reader even if it were purely a product of a highly honed imagination:

“Prizes. They arrived unexpectedly, or I waited greedily for them at the end of every school year.”

“Dotty Baker with the greasy hair did not get a prize, Maud Gray, who found it hard to read even simple sentences aloud never got a prize.”

“I saw two beautiful women wheeling prams...Dotty Baker, Maud Gray! As they passed...I could not even assert my superiority...First in geometry, French, English, history...I grudged their proud cloaks as they trooped, clients of love, on their specially reserved side of the world.”

A like theme of strategic evasion of troublesome truth is seen in "The Mythmaker’s Office," in which a town’s officialdom passes a decree requiring that “All will cooperate in the denial of death.” Newspaper death notices disappear and, if printed, the word "death" becomes (ala certain obscenities now) abbreviated to first and last letters divided by dots or dashes. The fact that people still die spurs a resistance movement and court case:

“In the end,” a witness reminded the court, “each one of us is involved in dying, and though we are forbidden by law to acknowledge this, surely it is necessary for us to learn the facts of death and burial?”

“What!” the public in court said. “And corrupt the rising generation!”