Ulrica Hume

Love is not effortless. Love fails. It causes pain. It fades into memory. It changes and fluctuates. Sometimes it's conditional. And sometimes it's not enough. But sometimes, despite all its flaws, it is forever. Ulrica Hume's collection of interrelated short stories, House of Miracles, examines love in all of these permutations.

Starting with an ensemble cast of seemingly unrelated characters, Hume eventually connects each of them through one of three characters whose relationship to each show more other and the others runs as a thread through all of the stories. Janet is a young woman living with her boyfriend, Jack, but having an affair with a co-worker and uncertain of the direction of her life and her heart. She is kind to her elderly neighbor Mrs. von Meurs, a woman at the end of her life who looks back on her experiences and her loves from a different perspective. Each of the short stories in the collection either adds another character or builds on Janet's, Jack's, or Mrs. von Meurs' past, slowly building each character and the reasons why they react to love the way that they do. The stories are full of heartbreak, sadness, and a poignancy for loves that don't end the way that movies do. There's a realism here, a quiet beauty in the writing, and an acknowledgment of the way in which the human heart continues to endure and strive for that forever love, whether it be between lovers or friends or family. show less

A story about life on life’s terms, with all its uncertainty. I’m not really much of a fiction reader, and the spirituality of the book is probably too subtle for a religion blog, so I don’t know that it was a good fit for me, really … yet once I began reading, I had a hard time setting it aside.

This story is a quest for purpose, by a middle-aged woman who seems to have lost ties with everything and everyone that once gave life meaning. She toys with religion, on a sort of show more intellectual level, trying to break through the intellectual shell to the experiential. She and her new friends find themselves “seeking something that is one breath, one heartbeat, one step away,” but with different approaches.

As it turns out, the spiritual side braids with the mundaneness of life, and the two cannot be torn apart. There is sadness in the story. It soon becomes apparent that even the most imaginative author would destroy the book’s theme by trying to tidy up all its confusion by book’s end … so we are left with a sort of melancholy realism. The draw of the characters, and the bizarre connection I felt to them, leaves me shaking my head. I can’t figure out if I’m happy to have read the story or not. I suspect I’ve fallen prey to precisely the emotions Hume wanted to evoke.

Lest my late-night meandering thoughts leave the wrong impression, I want to be clear that Hume writes with intelligence and feeling. A well-written, intriguing read. show less

A book of short stories that connect with a fine silk thread that delicately weaves them together. Give it time to feel the flow and you'll be in love with HOUSE OF MIRACLES.

The three main characters throughout are Jack, elderly Mrs. Von Meurs and Janet...yet there is much more, it's a book about life, deep and though-provoking.
One quote stays with me: " Life is full of changes. Everything changes from one thing and becomes something else, and then at the endof all the changes, you show more disappear."
I think any reader would be doing themselves a favor by reading this one!
Hume has delved into the human psyche and pulled out treasures....... show less

A wonderful book that's now sadly outdated. More than half of the places listed no longer exist or have moved.