Ratings12
Average rating3.6
With her peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but spacious and timeless stories, Alice Munro illumines the moment a life is shaped -- the moment a dream, or sex, or perhaps a simple twist of fate turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into another way of being. Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these stories (set in the world Munro has made her own: the countryside and towns around Lake Huron) about departures and beginnings, accidents, dangers, and homecomings both virtual and real, paint a vivid and lasting portrait of how strange, dangerous, and extraordinary the ordinary life can be.
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A 3.5 star read. Interesting but unfortunately unremarkable. Munro leads you down a certain path in each story to end her stories on a different note leaving you to contemplate different perspectives of life loss love and death. However many stories in this collection were repetitive in structure and not many characters were memorable in the end. I enjoyed the first few stories but as the collection progressed I slowly lost interest in the individual stories. As a collection the stories complement the theme of everyday life and the collection has a good mix of male and female protagonists. However the collection became stagnant for me as the subtle ending of the stories and the repetitive feel of the characters left me unimpressed and slightly disinterested. I like Alice Munro's writing style but I wanted to feel a more passionate reaction one way or another to the collection but I felt it ended up coming across for me as a bit of a damp squib. I would like to read more of Munro's work to see how it would compare to this collection as I am not well read when it comes to short story collection and maybe that's why this collection didn't enrapture me.