Author: Marina Keegan
Published: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 224
Rating: 2/5
Summary:
This is a collection of short stories, both fiction and nonfiction, from the award-winning Marina Keegan, a young woman who sadly lost her life in a car crash five days after graduation at Yale university.
Review:
This is a difficult book to review and I've been contemplating what rating to give this book. It's a difficult one to critique because the story of the author is so sad, but I've decided to try and put that aside and just look at the stories the way I would any other collection.
I do generally gravitate more towards magical realism and weirder stories when it comes to short stories, and this is a purely realist book, which is probably one of the major reasons this didn't quite jam with me. The stories are seperated into fiction and nonfiction, and of the two, I thought the nonfiction ones were the strongest. In the fiction section, there were a few stories that were very good, but a lot of them honestly felt a bit boring and I even ended up skipping quite a few.
The introduction of this book though, written by Anne Fadiman, is excellent and almost brought tears to my eyes; you can feel how much Keegan meant to those around her and what an impact she made in her short life. Fadiman speaks of great potentioal and I can see that potential in this book, and I can't help but feel sad for the fact that we will never see the author reach her fullest. I would've definitely wanted to keep my eye on her, but alas.
Even though this wasn't quite my cup of tea, I would still recommend giving it a go if you like short stories and realist fiction.
You can get the e-book on Amazon
You can read more about it on Goodreads
