While I enjoyed this collection of six short stories about nighttime epiphanies, by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, Patricia McCormick, Sarah Weeks, and Gene Luen Yang, I definitely liked some of the individual stories more than others. Part of it, I think, is the length factor, or the intended-audience factor: I like short short stories (or even just short-ish short stories) best when they’re really clever and/or a little experimental. The shorter stories in this collection, though, are pretty straightforward. My favorite of the shorter ones, by Patricia McCormick, was simultaneously uncomfortable and excellent: it’s about a teenage girl whose stepdad is clearly inappropriately interested in her, and how she teaches herself to drive, then stands up to him without really planning to. More pleasing to me, though, were the two longer pieces, by Libba Bray and David Levithan, which is possibly predictable, given that I already knew and liked their novels. Bray’s story, set in 1980, is about a group of Texas teenage girls who drive to Dallas for a Cheap Trick concert, but then find themselves unable to drive home. I like Bray’s writing style, which is energetic/almost breathless without being over-dramatic or forced. And then there was Levithan’s story, about a New York City night of honesty, a girl who goes to a party she doesn’t want to go to but then realizes that she can just leave, go do something else instead, and a boy who gets tired of the rote conversation of “what’s up?”/”not much” and “how are you?”/”fine.”
Up All Night: A Short Story Collection by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, et al.Harper Teen, 2008
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