A collection of short stories told in a dark fairy-tale style, covering themes from love, through loss to destiny, this book provides a huge dose of heartache and very little levity.
While I did not expect a book with a title such as this to be entirely frivolous, the back cover blurb did lead me to expect some measure of humour. My expectation was to be disappointed. These stories run the gamut from poignant to just plain depressing and the tiny glimmer of hope staked out in the last pages of the final story was not enough to balance the book.
Perhaps I was not in the right frame of mind when reading the stories. Perhaps I missed the humour supposedly contained within its pages. Perhaps I’m just a literary Luddite who wouldn’t know genius if it had its tongue down my throat. But not one story from this collection moved me to feel anything other than sorry for the protagonist. Nothing in it left me thinking and since I wasn’t being entertained or taught I had hoped to at least be provoked into thought. I kept reading to the end anticipating that the next story would be the one that made the effort worthwhile. If it had been a novel rather than a collection of shorter works I doubt I would have finished it at all.
Though well written I don’t think this book lived up to its promise. It was simply not for me.-Lynn
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