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A review by marireadstoomuch
Multitudes: Stories by Lucy Caldwell
5.0
Without a hint of awareness I thought to myself “this collection contains multitudes you know” as I neared the final story. Apt title, as it were.
Sometimes short story collections can bore me as I don’t fully connect with them due to their brevity, and that’s certainly not a problem here. Each story in Multitudes contains a fully realized character, in a fully realized place, and I felt connected to all of them — and at times struggled to move on.
The level of depth of feeling achieved in each story was an absolute triumph, and at times reminded me of moment in Emma Donoghue’s _Hood_. What stood out most is perhaps the inherent reality in the mundane: capturing depths of feeling directly is easy in a relative sense, but Caldwell excels at making experiences feel real by focusing not on the peak of drama (always), but also the Afters, the day-to-day, the recollection, the reflection, the moving forward.
Really, really good.
Sometimes short story collections can bore me as I don’t fully connect with them due to their brevity, and that’s certainly not a problem here. Each story in Multitudes contains a fully realized character, in a fully realized place, and I felt connected to all of them — and at times struggled to move on.
The level of depth of feeling achieved in each story was an absolute triumph, and at times reminded me of moment in Emma Donoghue’s _Hood_. What stood out most is perhaps the inherent reality in the mundane: capturing depths of feeling directly is easy in a relative sense, but Caldwell excels at making experiences feel real by focusing not on the peak of drama (always), but also the Afters, the day-to-day, the recollection, the reflection, the moving forward.
Really, really good.