This is why it's tough to review collections. The first story "Rosa" was fantastic and worth getting the book for. Another story toward the end, "The Love Child" was pretty good. Everything else was nothing to me.


Most of these pieces were not short stories as I define it. They were setups, introductions, writing exercises, author masturbation, but not stories. Here's how most of them went; Tell me a bunch of character names, where they live, what they like and dislike, who's secretly in love with who. Then tell me about how they sat around thinking about their lives. The End. That's not a story. That's what you do when you want to write but you don't have any ideas. It's masturbation and you should keep it to yourself.

Many seemed like they could have been written by the same person. There was no voice, or reason for writing them, as far as I could tell. ( )