Rebecca Lee (1)

I was surprised over and over while reading these stories of ethical dilemmas and disasters waiting to happen: surprised by what happened next, and by what didn't happen, and most of all by how much I was enjoying this collection.

Rebecca Lee uses humor wonderfully--a stressed dinner party hostess blurts out that she has a "favorite" member of the Donner Party--but she is never quirky for the sake of being quirky. At least a couple of these stories have the kind of richness of character and show more detail and theme I hope for (but don't always find) in a novel.

These are mature stories about people who are working at being mature themselves. I can certainly relate to that. Highly recommended. show less

I read this in a single sitting. That's not a terrific achievement as this collection of seven short stories isn't terribly long but, even if it were, I think I would have done the same.

Lee's characters are so fundamentally real. It's odd. When I sit back and think about them outside of the act of reading them, they seem so...perhaps too...self-aware and self-reflective. I have the thought, "Surely, not everyone on the planet is this introspective." Yet, when I step back into the next story, show more its narrator again seems someone I can reach out and touch, someone I know, someone real.

Most of the stories end on an inhale, a moment when the situation is understood or the problem is defined, but the future is only vaguely indicated. I usually do not care for this but it worked very well here, causing me to think about, "What might this go? What will be the path taken from the present we see to final ending that Lee prefigures?"

I wouldn't say that these stories deliver any great insights or life-changing moments, but they are alive and heartbreaking and eminently readable. show less

Scoot over, Alice Munro, and make room on the short story couch for Rebecca Lee, the wonderful writer of this striking collection called 'Bobcat and Other Stories'. Reading each one is a journey into a perfectly described world, populated with totally unique, authentic characters.

Narrating in the first person works well for these little tales that are each picture-perfect in their own way. I was reminded of a delving into a rich buffet of stories, wishing for another ‘chapter’ in many show more cases, but always very involved and ultimately impressed.

There are several themes that appear in these short tales. Most have a connection to a college campus and it’s obvious that Lee loves these settings as she describes buildings, professors, and the intellectual atmosphere of the places. She writes about the interrelationships between people, identity and choice, and both what’s on the surface and underneath the appearances of our lives. Several characters have interesting tics, some have warm, strong personalities or families, some have political or global connections, and many are going through transition.

Rebecca Lee says that she is a very slow writer, but I think that works well for her. In an interview online, she mentioned something that John Gardner said about revision: that the first draft is building the home and the subsequent drafts are living in it. That’s an excellent description of the level of her writing - ‘living inside the work’. I know that I will revisit these stories and will find them just as fascinating a second and third time. This is highly recommended for readers who love excellent short story collections. show less

I liked it—and loved the writing—but by the end I couldn't help wishing for a little more reach on Lee's part. She's a very skillful craftsman, and I would have liked to see her explore a wider literary universe, because there was a certain sameness to the milieu of each story. The two kinds of very circumscribed universes—academia, and tenderly tenuous relationships—got to feeling a bit claustrophobic after a while. That said, the first story was a knockout, a little jeweler's show more setting of fears, and the second and last—really, all of these were very good. I think if I had my druthers I'd have rather read them separately, in different publications, over the course of a year or two than in one collection, because they got lost in each other's shadows a bit. But the work is topnotch, and I'm interested to see where she goes from here. show less