As I write this I note that there's already been 26 reviews written. It's therefore unlikely that I can add anything. My 4-star rating tells my story - very good, but not wonderful. I listened to them while I ran long distances and they made the time go quickly. Kymberly Dakin did a very good job of reading them, I think. ( )

A dreary short story collection about women in odd situations, set in Canada.

I'll confess that I didn't really enjoy this book. I didn't read more than one story per day and in between stories, I did think about them when I wasn't reading. Because they were odd? Because I couldn't related to them much? Perhaps I found the book more interesting as I read it than I did at the end as a whole.

The story I liked best was "Tricks", which features Shakespeare's plays and has a Shakespearean end, and contains superstition versus psychology on the matter of fate. The story I liked the least was "Trespasses". I felt so sad for the young girl, burdened with so much knowledge. ( )

Each story has a kernal of mystery and hurt. ( )

Alice Munro won the 2009 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction. I have occasionally come across one of her stories in an anthology or The New Yorker, but I have never actually read an entire volume of her work. I understand why she deserves this prize.

These stories have a smoothness to them: no rough edges, nothing unusual, simply people living ordinary lives. Of these eight stories, five stand alone, but the most absorbing and the most interesting are three involving a character named Juliet. This set lies so close to the border of a novel, I wish with all my heart it comes out finished and complete. The ends are tied up too quickly, because I did not want the series to end.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy all of them – I absolutely did! But I found myself deep into Juliet, because Munro’s prose is that clever, that clear and bright. Here is a passage from the first in the series, “Chance”

“Juliet cleaned up the stroller, and Penelope, and herself, and set off on a walk into town. She had the excuse that she needed a certain brand of mild disinfectant soap with which to wash the diapers—if she used ordinary soap the baby would get a rash. But she had other reasons, irresistible though embarrassing.
“This was the way she had walked to school for years of her life. Even when she was going to college, and came home on a visit, she was still the same—a girl going to school. Would she never be done going to school? Somebody asked Sam [her father] that at a time when she had just won the Intercollegiate Latin Translation Prize, and he had said, “’Fraid not.” (101).

Munro shows us the overarching theme of these stories in the title. Each story has a character trying to escape, but most often -- even when they do get away – ties that bind hold them to the past. As Thomas Wolfe said, “You can’t go home again.” And you can’t get away from home either. Five stars

-Jim, 7/5/09 ( )

Lovely book by Alice Munro ( )