Thankfully, sometimes curiosity doesn’t kill the cat (Follow-up on “The Wonder Garden” and my thoughts on “Afterglow” by Lauren Acampora)

Before I get into my review of the third short story in The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora, which is “Afterglow”, I want to address a mistake that made in my review for the second story in the book (The Wonder Garden). Someone left a comment in the comment section of that review, saying that I had misunderstood the story when it came to the part about Noah saying that he was adopted. For some reason, I originally didn’t realize that Noah had been lying when he told Nayana that he was adopted. Admittedly, I was pretty bored for most of the story, so by the time that I got to the end of the story, I was definitely having an extremely difficult time paying attention to the story. I’m really sorry for getting that part of the story all mixed up and confused when I talked about it in my review. I usually try to be careful about making sure that I get the details of a book or TV show right when I review them, so I feel really bad about making that mistake.

That being said, I went back and read “The Wonder Garden” again before I read “Afterglow”. While I’m very sorry for the mistake that I made in my review, I still stand by everything else that I said, as well as the score that I gave the story (5 out of 10) though. I still think that the story is all over the place and very unfocused. When I read it the second time, I still couldn’t tell what exactly Lauren Acampora was trying to do with that story. I feel like she wasn’t entirely sure what she wanted the story to truly be about. Having read it twice, if I had to guess what the point of the story is, it’s to show that Rosalie is determined to overcome whatever adversity life throws at her and stand tall in the end, but I could be wrong about that. I have to admit that when I was reading the story again after reviewing it back in June, I found myself thinking that Rosalie was rather annoying and sanctimonious throughout the whole story; with that said, here are my thoughts on “Afterglow”.

Right off the bat, I have to say that I absolutely loved “Afterglow”. The story was definitely a huge improvement over “The Wonder Garden”, and I’d go as far as saying that I liked it even more than I liked the first story in the book, “Ground Fault”, and I really loved that story. I should probably mention that I recently bought the audiobook version of The Wonder Garden on iTunes, which wasn’t available back when I originally discovered this book, so I bought copy of the actual book at that point. Now that I have the audiobook version of The Wonder Garden, I decided to just go ahead and start listening to it from the beginning rather than skipping over “Ground Fault”. I’m really glad that I didn’t skip over listening to it, because I loved “Ground Fault” even more than I did when I read it the first time months ago, but I digress.

Welcome to Old Cranbury, Everybody! (My thoughts on “Ground Fault” from The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora)

To start this review off on a bit of a tangent, I’ve never been a huge fan of the short story genre, and my opinions on most short story collections that I’ve read over the years have typically been very mixed. Personally, I’ve often times had a very hard time getting invested in the lives of the characters in a short story or the plot of short stories. When it comes to short stories, I’ve always felt like the story either ends before I’ve had a chance to truly get into the story, or the story ends right when I’m starting to care about the characters or what’s happening in the story. Obviously the short story genre is popular with other people, and I know that some people prefer to read a story that they can typically read from start to finish in one sitting. However, I personally prefer a story that’s several hundred pages long, because it gives the writer a chance to really flesh out and develop both the characters and the story itself.

When I was in college, as an English major at UNL, I had to take quite a few classes where we had to read a lot of short stories. I had one professor for two different classes, the first was an advanced fiction writing class, and the other was a capstone course that English majors at UNL were required to take. My professor was a big fan of the short story genre and the short-short story genre when it came to the curriculum for those two classes. This was something that often frustrated me given my mixed feelings regarding the short story genre. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking about this as a way of bashing her or anybody else out there who’s a fan of the genre.

To be perfectly honest, the first short story collection that I ever not only truly liked, but truly loved was Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. The teacher that I mentioned assigned Olive Kitteridge for the students in her advanced fiction writing class to read. A big part of why I love Olive Kitteridge so much is because I really think the style and structure that Elizabeth Strout used for the book as a whole solved my biggest complaints regarding the genre by writing each story so they would be able to stand on their own, but all of the stories in the book are still connected with the titular Olive Kitteridge serving as a common thread in each story. Strout wrote that book in such a way that while the stories may have ended, the reader would still be able to get a glimpse of what happened to the characters from one story in the stories that followed. When I was reading Olive Kitteridge, I finally found myself really being able to get into each story, because I knew that there was a chance that I would see the characters that I was reading about again in at least one of the stories that followed, so I never felt cheated once I had finished reading a story in Olive Kitteridge.