The linked stories in Our Love Could Light the World add up to a satisfyingly vivid portrait of a broken family, the Dugans. The author, Anne Leigh Parrish, is right – you wouldn’t want these people as neighbors. This is the kind of family that brings down home values – alcoholic dad, unhappy mom, wild brood of kids and a freely pooping dog. As characters, however, they’re absolutely endearing and often hilarious. While many of the things they do make you cringe – the children, for example, have a habit of bringing home strays (people, not animals) – you know they’re, more often than not, motivated by love and compassion. As a reader, you can’t help but become attached to these people, flawed as they are. Often I would get so invested in a story line, particularly eldest daughter Angie’s, that I wanted it to continue, uninterrupted. But that’s not what Parrish has set out to do here. This is the story of a family, not its parts. Each member gets to have his or her say while their individual and collective dramas wax and wane, change and resolve. It’s all very messy -- like life. ( )

Our Love Could Light the World by Anne Leigh Parrish

The Dugans are a family of 7 trying to make ends meet once again in a new rental home. The yard doesn’t get mowed, the house is a mess, and the five children run free and horrify their neighbors. One day Lavinia decides she cannot live like that anymore and leaves her husband. All their lives change at that moment as the family has to shift in new ways.

The story was very slow and felt choppy and confusing. There were times that within a few sentences you had completely changed location without any reference to it at all. The story never really followed a sequence of events or time. The characters felt two dimensional and just like names on a piece of paper. I never felt any depth to any of them or any connection. I wanted more depth and feelings from them. I felt like they were all cold unfeeling people who just walked around looking for somebody to talk to or take care of them. Lavinia left her husband for Chip even though she never loved him; she just wanted his money. Potter apparently never not over Lavinia but other than a few vague references to the fact that he was still in love with her, you would never know. Random people would enter the book and then soon they would just fall off the face of the earth, never to be referenced again. I didn’t feel like there was any emotion to this story.

I felt as though this story was written by a kid for a high school project rather than an actual published book. The only reason I finished it was because I knew I would be writing a review and needed to have all the facts and story line before I did so, and I really hoped it would pick up at the end, it did not.

*I received a free copy of this book by StoryCartel in exchange for my honest review.
( )

I usually avoid short stories, but this book proved to be a treasure. The inter-connected stories of the Dugan family are a device reminiscent of the noteworthy Olive Kitteridge that works very well to give readers an opportunity to become familiar with this functionally dysfunctional family. The characters are fully known in vignettes that feature them both individually and as a whole. ( )

I loved this book of short stories about people who are living a hardscrabble life, trying, and not always succeeding at being parents, siblings, and friends. ( )

I have always loved the idea of a set of connecting stories with an overlying theme essentially showcasing snapshots of the same area or family or event. Anne Leigh Parrish's collection of stories, Our Love Could Light the World, is one of those books. But, just like the other I've read in recent years (Olive Kitteredge, anyone?), this one fell a bit flat for me for reasons I will explain shortly.

Read the rest of this review on The Lost Entwife on Feb. 13, 2014. ( )