This collection of fifteen short stories (which I heard about via Goodreads then saw at the library) has been good jury duty reading, by which I mean it’s light and easy enough that I could comfortably read it during breaks, even if several simultaneous conversations were happening around me. “Light and easy,” though, isn’t necessarily my favorite kind of short story, and I found myself wanting more interest, more weirdness, more challenge.<\/p>\n
All the stories are about looking for love online, which is a reasonably interesting conceit, but I probably would have liked the book more if there had been some queer relationships rather than all the stories being about male\/female romance. Note that I didn’t say “man\/woman romance” there: the book’s final story, “Stupid Humans,” is about a deer and a polar bear. This is probably my favorite story in the book: I like the quirkiness of the premise and the humor and poignancy of the plot. I like sentences like: “It is a little bit hard for polar bears to hit the right keys sometimes, with those big paws” (234). I like the fact that the polar bear and the deer meet in a climate change chat room on a site that isn’t really a dating site, and I like the details of their flirtation. Other highlights of the book for me included “Love, Really,” which is narrated in the second person and tells the story of the arc of a relationship through the repetition of the phrase “this is the part where,” and “Limerence,” because it focuses on a man’s infatuation rather than a woman’s. I also appreciated the structure of “Love Quiz,” which offers three possible endings, ranging from anodyne to sweet to gritty, and some of the descriptions of falling for someone in “Dog People,” like a character who feels like “anticipation had opened the gates of her senses; she was noticing more things around her than usual” (184). Or this part, from the same story: <\/p>\n
She felt as if she was inhabiting her body in a new way, more consciously, and she felt an awareness of every step, the way her hands did things like tuck back a stray hair. The automaticness of her seemed to be laid bare, and it was as if she was seeing that for the first time. (190)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Elsewhere in the book, certain repetitions bugged me: two stories involve women sending pictures of their kayaks (with or without themselves) to potential dates; two stories mention The Good Earth<\/em>; two stories talk about how guys who are balding always wear hats. And I sometimes found myself not quite believing in the characters\/their world, or maybe just not interested enough: the middle-aged women worrying about finding love before it’s too late, the apple-martini-drinking New York girl, the woman who chats online with a guy for two months before suggesting they meet, the man and woman who joke that they “define the gender wars” because he likes Billy Collins and Nirvana and she likes Anne Sexton and Tori Amos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This collection of fifteen short stories (which I heard about via Goodreads then saw at the library) has been good jury duty reading, by which I mean it’s light and easy enough that I could comfortably read it during breaks, even if several simultaneous conversations were happening around me. “Light and easy,” though, isn’t necessarily […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}