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carlageek 's review for:
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: And Other Stories
by Carson McCullers
The five stars here are for the title novella, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. It’s beautiful and delightful, a tale told over whiskey sours out on the porch on a slow, sultry Southern afternoon. It starts and ends in a sleepy, nearly abandoned town, but reminisces more lively days when a handful of misfit characters came together in unlikely bonds of love and hate and jealousy. It’s just wonderful, sweet and tangy and sad and funny and poignant, like a lighter, more comical version of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
The rest of the stories in the collection, though, barely rate three stars—some not even that. They all reside in McCullers’s wheelhouse, playing on themes of love and loss, of the discomfort that comes of being isolated from human connection, but they don’t all work very well.
The rest of the stories in the collection, though, barely rate three stars—some not even that. They all reside in McCullers’s wheelhouse, playing on themes of love and loss, of the discomfort that comes of being isolated from human connection, but they don’t all work very well.