oh my god, this was amazing. HEARTBREAKING -- all ten stories were about loss -- but one of the best collections i've ever read, no fucking shit. ( )

I went into this anthology of short fiction thinking it would be the perfect way to clear my palate. I had just given up on [a:Paula Volsky|261937|Paula Volsky|http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-F-50x66-d699becf6b6f088e26f741df8c92d54e.jpg]'s [b:Illusion|12408735|Illusion|Frank Peretti|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1331936724s/12408735.jpg|17377431], a fantasy re-casting of the French Revolution with an unwieldy front-half I didn't have the patience for.

Oh boy.

It isn't that Porter's writing is terrible, far from it. I never had to stop and shake off a fit of grammatical outrage... but I never paused over a sentence and marveled at its construction, wanted to read it out loud and savor its music, its bobbing ebb and flow. It's functional prose, and not much more.

It's just everything else. Porter is great with his ending paragraphs--you could read them individually and get that same thunk, that impression of finality and importance and great meaning. I just don't think he can back it up with the beginning and middle. I was skimming from the title story on, and it all just felt the same to me: another first-person tale of suburban woe, character conflict with normal, flawed people going about their lives. Like a character-based indie movie, or romantic comedy. Formulaic. They read like the output of a very serious twenty-something who's taken too many creative writing classes with other very serious twenty-somethings, trying to make a statement about "the modern human condition" without ever saying anything original, or doing anything original, or really doing anything all that memorable at all. I'm sure that a month from now, I'd be hard-pressed to detail anything I've read.

Maybe, given the space to really dig into his characterization, Porter isn't so bad. Maybe his novel [b:In Between Days|13326427|In Between Days|Andrew Porter|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1339170458s/13326427.jpg|18533583] is better. He's certainly got a list of awards long enough after his name, though the smug picture of him on his website is a little jarring. He's even from Lancaster county, just to the west of where I grew up, and now lives in San Antonio, which is just to my south. I have so many granfalloonian reasons to like him.

But I just don't. ( )

Solid, well-constructed stories. ( )

An interesting thing about Andrew Porter’s stories in this collection is that they are all told in the first-person. Several are from a child or teenager’s perspective, or from an adult looking back on events from childhood. “The Hole” packs the memories of a traumatic boyhood event into a few powerful pages. In “Connecticut,” a boy whose father spends several years living by himself away from the family after a nervous breakdown discovers his mother is having an affair with a neighbor, Mrs. Bentley. In “Azul” a sadly childless couple hosts an exchange student and indulges him beyond common sense. In the title story a college student and a lonely professor create a deep connection that will haunt them both long afterward.

These stories flow effortlessly and each one attempts to truthfully examine, understand, and resolve events from the past. ( )

These stories are evocative and unsettling. I particularly enjoyed the details the author includes to describe the settings of the stories. ( )