5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful Words, July 13 2000
This review is from: Vanilla and Other Stories (Paperback)
This collection of short stories is amazing. The way the author uses words is truly striking. With her words, she tears away all coverings of the spirit to show people as they really are. Short stories must necessarily show limited character development because of length, but the author gets around the limitation by typically focusing on what happens within a very short period of time. Most of the stories contain little action, just living. But during the short tale you are in the mind of the character. Sometimes you can understand, sometimes you cannot, but you always know that there is a real person with everything that is important in common with YOU.
Most of the stories reflect on the emotional aspects of sexuality, and the sexuality is generally homosexual and usually from a woman's viewpoint. Reading as a heterosexual man, these stories gave me an unusual and warm view of the emotions of a sort of person I am normally not priveleged to know. However, not all the stories contain sexuality as an ingredient. One of my favorites was about a woman who had been a famous ballet dancer, but had contracted a serious muscular disease and was left barely able to walk. A second was about a woman who had cancer and was dealing with the shortness of her future.
These are powerful stories. The only occasional drawback is that they are so intensely personal that sometimes, because people can be very different from each other, it is difficult to understand the feelings that are being expressed. But that problem is not always present, and the strength, the stark humanity in the words, is so amazing that this cannot stand in the way of appreciation.
I would not recommend this book to anyone with homophobic sensibilities, but if you can look past that, you will find reading this book a very rewarding experience.
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