Take a photo of a barcode or cover
geertje 's review for:
How to Breathe Underwater
by Julie Orringer
I feel really ‘meh’ about this book. Like I already said in my review of ‘the apple’, I prefer my short stories to have a somewhat clear beginning, middle and ending, with which I actually mean that I want them to have a clear plot. Don’t get me wrong: I do really value characters and I also like books that are more character driven, but I feel that it is much harder to pull off. With this book, I constantly felt that Orringer was onto something, but it just wasn’t it. The stories felt slightly off; they could have been great but weren’t. It was interesting to read about characters with different backgrounds, though (a lot of them featured Jewish characters and Jewish communities, which is a community I don’t know too much about and am not familiar with). Apart from that, I can’t really say that I felt that this book was anything special.