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.

So…What’s the point of this story? I really wish I knew. (My thoughts on “The Wonder Garden” from The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora)

Let me start out this review by saying that I went into reading this story with high hopes given the fact that the story share its title with the book, and I thought that “Ground Fault” was a great way to start the book. Unfortunately, I have to say that I found the story “The Wonder Garden” to be rather disappointing. For the record, I think that Lauren Acampora presented a lot of good ideas for a story in “The Wonder Garden”, but I feel like the writing for this story is all over the place and lacks focus, which really surprised me given how well Acampora developed John as a character in “Ground Fault”, while still keeping the story very tight, focused and contained.

Honestly, it’s very hard for me to describe the plot of “The Wonder Garden” other than the fact that the central character in this story was a woman named Rosalie given the fact that the story seemed to go in all sorts of directions. It starts off by focusing on the fact that Rosalie and her family were hosting a foreign exchange student, a girl named Nayana, who was Bangladesh. After having the story be about the family hosting Nayana for a while, the focus of the story seemed to shift to the fact that Rosalie was the wife a doctor, so she spends a great deal time being involved with her children’s school by serving on the school board. Personally, I really enjoyed that part of the story, mainly because it had some interesting moments featuring John from “Ground Fault”.

Based on Rosalie’s interactions with John, it was pretty clear that she doesn’t like him very much. Given the way he was portrayed in “Ground Fault” and how the couple that was buying the house John was inspecting seemed to react to him, I can definitely believe that he might rub some people the wrong way despite the fact I think that he seemed like a pretty nice guy for the most part. I think that getting to know how Rosalie feels about John was a great way for Acampora to continue to develop him as a character even though he wasn’t the focus of this story. Even though John was only featured in the story briefly, Acampora did a great job of making it clear to the reader that neither Rosalie nor John is very fond of each other.

At one point in the story, Rosalie witnessed a strange interaction between her husband, Michael, and a woman when their family was having dinner at a restaurant. When I was reading this part of the story, I thought that the story would end up being about Rosalie finding out that Michael was having an affair. However, Rosalie asked Michael who the woman was, he denied knowing her, and this particular plot thread was dropped after that. I’ll admit this part of the story really intrigued me, and I really wish that this aspect of the story had been fleshed out more. Give the fact that it only lasted for a few pages, it ended up feeling like pointless filler, as far as I’m concerned.

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.

Tied: It’s a real shame that the cast of Bridesmaids never showed up, because that probably would have made this book A LOT better (My thoughts on Book #4 in the Tangled book series by Emma Chase)

 

As I said back in my review for Tangled (My thoughts on Tangled), that book and the way it was written reminded me a lot of How I Met Your Mother. If you read my review for Tangled, you might remember that I also said that I really hoped that when I eventually finished reading all of the books in the Tangled series, I wouldn’t be left feeling so disappointed by the ending of the series that I would be wishing that I had never taken time to read the entire series in the first place like the series finale of How I Met Your Mother left me feeling. Right off the bat, I’ll say that while I found myself being incredibly disappointed by Tied, it thankfully didn’t leave me feeling so upset by the way the series ended that I wish that I never invested my time in reading the entire Tangled series in the first place. However, I’ll say right now that in my opinion Tied is definitely the worst book in the series. That being said, I should probably mention that technically I still have to read the short story “Holy Frigging Matrimony”, but since this book is last book in the series and “Holy Frigging Matrimony” apparently goes back to an earlier point in Drew and Kate’s relationship, I’m going to consider Tied to be the end of series.

If had to say right off the bat what one of my biggest problems with Tied is, it probably would be that I feel like the overall plot of this book is very cliché and paper-thin, and it’s severely lacking conflict that’s genuinely interesting or entertaining. That’s a real shame, because one thing that I’ve always loved about the Tangled series is that it’s written almost entirely from a man’s point of view, which I’ve always felt helped put a fresh spin on a genre that’s often full of clichés and severely lacking in originality. Honestly, Tied reminded me a lot of the movie Bridesmaids when I was reading it given how the book focuses a lot on Drew and Kate’s bachelor and bachelorette parties, as well as their wedding, which takes place in the epilogue. Personally, I think the movie Bridesmaids is much more entertaining and funny than Tied is. Tied feels like more of a 256 pages long epilogue to the series than anything else, which I think is pretty weird given the fact that this book has an actual epilogue. However, the book also included some flashbacks to when James was a baby, and he’s two years old now, which allows the reader to see what Drew and Kate are like as parents.

One thing that I loved about Tangled and the epilogue in Twisted was getting to read about Drew’s views on relationships, women and life in general. While Drew has definitely always had a tendency to be a bit of an asshole at times, he’s at least always been willing to admit that he can be an asshole at times, and I still thought that he was a very likable protagonist in Tangled and Twisted. However, I have to say that when I was reading Tied, I suddenly found myself frequently thinking that he wasn’t a likable asshole any more, he was just being an obnoxious asshole most of the time throughout the book.