A review by seebrandyread
So We Can Glow: Stories by Leesa Cross-Smith

emotional funny lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

So We Can Glow is a celebration of the feminine, of women’s desire and power. The characters in these stories are familiar, not only because they’re wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, lovers, and friends, but because they make mistakes, lose control, love hard, and feel too much. The book offers up a somewhat specific version of femininity–cisgendered and heterosexual–and tends to gloss over the race of its characters. The stories feel like fits and starts in that they often come across as bits and pieces of scenes and characters that haven’t yet made it into longer works. Cross-Smith is a bottomless well of language for longing–longing for sex, escape, transformation, love, the past, the future, but it’s a longing that begins to feel a bit one note after a while. She explores a wide range of heterosexual interactions, both healthy and not, appropriate and not, and the ways and reasons women are attracted to men, but the prose tends to get bogged down in explicit description and plot movement at the expense of meaningful interiority, making the book a fun read but without any stand-out moments or characters.