Bitter-sweet: 12 Short Stories for Modern Life by Julie Stock REVIEW
Rating: 3/5
About 3 years ago there used to be this little weekly competition online that gave you 20 minutes to write a story using one of three given titles. You had a reasonable chance of winning due to the relatively small body count and I believe I would have (or should have) cracked it had it not imploded fairly shortly after I started entering. The kind of flash stories people came up with were actually pretty well written in terms of form and the savvier entrants were probably adapting something they already had. That being said, the stories on this site tended to be a little bit simple, sentimental and samey- as if there were some invisible guidelines about subject matter and style. This little collection reminds me of those stories.
The author is a pro, she knows how to write a story that hits the ground running and has an engaging voice. Yet there is no attempt to do any serious boundary pushing. It makes for an intriguing read because the absence of novelty- indeed the twist to story 4 was predictable enough- is balanced by the finely tuned awareness of the market and the basics of effective story telling. This is how a business woman writes. Sometimes there is a simple twist, sometimes there is no twist at all but it’s quite good if you like this sort of thing, as you might say about a daytime soap opera that knows how to please its target audience.
Of course, calling (some of) these stories 'sentimental' implies that they are to some degree untrue. 'A Random Act of Kindness' is, in a sense, a story tailor made for a competition panel and perhaps was originally. Its philosophy is: anyone can be made homeless, homeless people are just like you or me and society should take care of homeless people. And who would argue with that? Of course, there is a flip side to this argument illustrated recently when the illustrious Metropole hotel (where I live) opened its doors to the homeless (due to Covid 19) and had to ask them to leave because they trashed the place. The story doesn't attempt to deal with the complexity of the issue of homelessness, it simply goes down the over simplified left wing route. It might have gone down the over simplified right wing route but that would have been folly. Most competitions are run by people with left wing inclinations.
The author is a pro, she knows how to write a story that hits the ground running and has an engaging voice. Yet there is no attempt to do any serious boundary pushing. It makes for an intriguing read because the absence of novelty- indeed the twist to story 4 was predictable enough- is balanced by the finely tuned awareness of the market and the basics of effective story telling. This is how a business woman writes. Sometimes there is a simple twist, sometimes there is no twist at all but it’s quite good if you like this sort of thing, as you might say about a daytime soap opera that knows how to please its target audience.
Of course, calling (some of) these stories 'sentimental' implies that they are to some degree untrue. 'A Random Act of Kindness' is, in a sense, a story tailor made for a competition panel and perhaps was originally. Its philosophy is: anyone can be made homeless, homeless people are just like you or me and society should take care of homeless people. And who would argue with that? Of course, there is a flip side to this argument illustrated recently when the illustrious Metropole hotel (where I live) opened its doors to the homeless (due to Covid 19) and had to ask them to leave because they trashed the place. The story doesn't attempt to deal with the complexity of the issue of homelessness, it simply goes down the over simplified left wing route. It might have gone down the over simplified right wing route but that would have been folly. Most competitions are run by people with left wing inclinations.
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