Book Brouhaha

Review: **May contain spoilers** This story is... odd.  Since there's no summary provided I will briefly recap.  It's from the viewpoint of a man suffering from depression.  His son died and the death caused him and his wife to drift apart.  Most of the story takes place during what appears  to be some sort of party/convention for people with unusual eyes.  So the story switched back and forth between him talking to people at the party and flashbacks of the past. It's odd for several reasons.  The first is the author's choice of second person tense.  Instead of saying "he did this" or "he did that" it was "you did this" or "you did that."  Personally, I found this made the story harder to get into.  Instead of the story coming across as me getting to know the characters as I would a friend it was it became "psychological."  The end result was that I felt more detached from the story than I probably would have ha...

Summary:   No summary available. Review: In “Prisoners Exercising,” a woman intent on keeping a perfect household is drawn into her own washing machine. Once inside, she experiences a series of events reminiscent of the old riddle about being stuck in a room with only a mirror and a table, the answer to your escape lying in a series of word games. As in the riddle, the reader has to suspend belief and allow the author creative license in transforming an unremarkable day in the life of an unremarkable woman into something enchanting. The first time I read this story I was unsure how I felt about it. The riddle-like quality of the story’s action is combined with an almost Pedro Almodóvar-esque sense of entertainment: provocatively real characters are presented in situations that are so normal as to be mundane, until they are viewed from an alternate perspective. As with a Pedro Almodóvar film, this story has to be experienced once, mul...