My Rating: 3 stars
In general, I’ve never really been a fan of the short
story genre. When reading fiction, I prefer either novellas or
full-length novels because an important part of the reading experience for me
is being able to connect with the characters I’m reading about in some way,
which I personally find very difficult (sometimes even nearly impossible) to do
with short stories due to the little amount of time I get to spend with each
character. Because of this, I usually go into short story collections
with a slightly lowered set of expectations and rely more on the plot to drive
each of the stories forward – a compensation of sorts for the already
anticipated lack of character development. In this regard, short
story collections that have multiple linked stories and/or the same characters
appearing in more than one story usually work better for me and this is often
what I look for when I approach short stories, though of course I know that
this type of format is more of an exception than the norm.
This particular short story collection was one that I had
high hopes for due to all the hype surrounding it and also all the highly-rated
reviews (not just on Goodreads but elsewhere as well). Unfortunately
though, turns out this collection was not for me, as I struggled through most
of it and had a really hard time connecting with the stories as well as the
book as a whole. The biggest issue for me was the lack of a coherent plot
and/or purpose to each of the stories, which made them seem all over the place
to me and also hard to follow. Perhaps I am too used to all narratives
(whether short stories or full length novels) having a discernible beginning,
middle, and ending (or at least some type of closure to the story) and being
driven either by characters or plot or both, so that the narrative is
accessible to the average reader. The stories in this particular
collection were written in a way that didn’t follow any of these patterns
-- some didn’t have a beginning or ending and some – a few particularly short
ones that were only 1 to 2 pages long – didn’t have all 3 (beginning, middle,
ending), which honestly made no sense to me. I’m not sure if I’m
explaining this correctly but the closest analogy I could think of is one
related to movies (which I guess is appropriate given it’s Oscars weekend as I
write this) – basically it felt like one of those segments we sometimes see in
the awards shows where they mash together a hodgepodge of scenes from a dozen
or so different movies into one extended video clip, with the goal of relaying
a particular message / theme / idea. It seemed to me that the main
goal of each story was to relay particular aspects of womanhood – of what it
meant to be a female in modern times – by capturing specific, isolated moments
in various women’s lives and exploring their emotions, feelings, thoughts
through it. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this approach and
judging from the reviews, many of the readers out there were able to properly
appreciate this method of storytelling so this is likely one of those “it’s not
the book, it’s me” instances. I’m also the type of reader who doesn’t
like to be left hanging when I read books (which is one reason why I rarely DNF
a book once I’ve started it) – so with every story in this collection having an
“ending” that just drops off abruptly (and several times unexpectedly), it was
a bit unsatisfying and I found myself wishing there was more to each story than
the snippet that was given.
Despite the obvious issues I had with the format of this
collection, I couldn’t bring myself to rate this lower than 3 stars because
there were definitely other things that I liked and overall, I do feel that
this collection was above average in terms of the writing. There
was a bold honesty to the writing that was refreshing and a few of the stories
I truly did enjoy reading. I think if this author were to write a novella
or full length novel, I would most definitely read it, as I liked the prose
itself and the style, it’s just that the short story format in this instance
didn’t work for me. Again, as I always say in these instances where I’m
clearly the outlier with certain books, I suggest also checking out other
reviews for a more well-rounded perspective before deciding whether to give
this one a try.
Received ARC from Penguin Books via Edelweiss
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