Helpful Score: 3
There's no doubt Joyce Carol Oates is an amazing author, and while I'm usually a fan of her works, I found this book hard to commit to and put it down after the first few stories. It might very well be that I'm simply not a fan of short stories - I'd rather read a long sprawling Oates work - in general. The writing is elegant and the stories are well-constructed as you'd expect from Oates, but beware that this book contains 21 short stories rather than an in-depth full-feature work.
Love this book. Each story unique, each written from perspectives of very different characters.
This collection of short stories was surprisingly dark - well-written, but quite dark. Short stories are really not my favorite thing to read, and this was unfortunately no exception. Some of the stories were more engrossing than others - but those were frustrating, too because they left me wanting more... I guess it is the format that really disappointed me the most. I should probably stop trying out short story collections - the only one that hasn't been a disappointment was _Nocturnes_.
Haven't read this one yet.
