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A review by caterina_x
Don't Kiss Me: Stories by Lindsay Hunter
3.0
3.5 stars
Some sentences in this book, some parts of the stories, cut me through like a knife.
Others had me wincing from too much rawness.
As with most collections, there were stories that stood out (I'm totally in awe of the 'RV people', for instance; I liked 'Dallas' and 'Leta's Mummy' and the one about Peggy Paula) and some that I wanted to skip and ended up skimming. ('Our Man', 'After') It was all raw and intense and real, whatever that means. I guess, thinking about it now, it means no sugar coating, life at its ugliest. Perhaps that's daring. But after a while, the similarity in voice and style made it like it was the same person narrating over and over; the stories blended in my head. Like another reviewer said, there wasn't a human face to latch on to. Just the ugliness.
It's a delicate balance: making a story collection that has the same theme or feel or at least a thread that runs through the stories and gives the book some sort of cohesion, but also ensuring each story stands out. I read a book a while back which was similar to this: that one had dark and apocalyptic and end-of-the-world stories and they were all the same. Some months down the line and I only remember one of the twenty-odd stories. Other books have great individual stories but they're all over the place thematically speaking. I can think of one, maybe two, collections that I've read in the last few years that achieve this balance: this wasn't one of them.
Some sentences in this book, some parts of the stories, cut me through like a knife.
Others had me wincing from too much rawness.
As with most collections, there were stories that stood out (I'm totally in awe of the 'RV people', for instance; I liked 'Dallas' and 'Leta's Mummy' and the one about Peggy Paula) and some that I wanted to skip and ended up skimming. ('Our Man', 'After') It was all raw and intense and real, whatever that means. I guess, thinking about it now, it means no sugar coating, life at its ugliest. Perhaps that's daring. But after a while, the similarity in voice and style made it like it was the same person narrating over and over; the stories blended in my head. Like another reviewer said, there wasn't a human face to latch on to. Just the ugliness.
It's a delicate balance: making a story collection that has the same theme or feel or at least a thread that runs through the stories and gives the book some sort of cohesion, but also ensuring each story stands out. I read a book a while back which was similar to this: that one had dark and apocalyptic and end-of-the-world stories and they were all the same. Some months down the line and I only remember one of the twenty-odd stories. Other books have great individual stories but they're all over the place thematically speaking. I can think of one, maybe two, collections that I've read in the last few years that achieve this balance: this wasn't one of them.