*I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a review*

I really wanted to like this book because I was so intrigued by the title and blurb, but I had the hardest time staying interested in the separate "snapshots" of each character's life. I think the individual stories were well written and interesting to a certain extent, but I was thrown off by how disconnected the novel felt as a whole. I do recommend this book however if you are someone who likes your fiction a little darker and can read without needing the entire cast of characters to connect.

Tiny book of short stories. I love LA but couldn't get into these at all.

1

Hopeless tales of lost and empty people.

The depth of the emotion is helped by the careful selection of the single connotative word/image and how Schutt reveals just enough to experience the characters in the moment, conceals just enough to leave you wondering why.

3.5 starts. As Ottessa Moshfegh said in her review, 'Come for the art of her exquisitely weird writing and stay for the human drama.' Dark and unsettling slice of life stories written in spare prose. Interior lives are explored at individuals most fragile times. Women feel burdened by others and want to escape while men are indifferent. There is a feeling of danger, disconnection, and loss bubbling just below the surface.

I loved the stories and they have now put me in the mood to go and read Ottessa Moshfegh's own 'exquisitely weird writing' in her book of short stories Homesick for Another World.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

These tales were interesting, but not my cup of tea. I think that half of me went along with the words in these stories, but the other half was confused by the writing. Some sentences I had to go back and read again because I was thinking that I had the wrong word. To me, it looked like some words maybe were repetitive so the author had to use a synonym to make sure it didn't repeat too much. I think that these actions caused the writing to simply not flow for me. If I have a hard time with a flow of a book, it's almost always a do not finish situation. However, I just powered through this one to see what each story entailed.

Some of the stories were alright, some of them were just plain dull. I think that this dullness was a contributing factor of the flow of the writing. If there's nothing interesting going on, and the words don't make sense, it seems that the dullness would be escalating per story. It was sometimes a struggle to get through. I hate to be so brutally honest, but I was glad that the stories were so short that I could finish them quickly.

I hope next time Christine Schutt just puts her thoughts out on paper without having to change her wording. It was confusing and just difficult to read. I would definitely give her another chance in the future to see if there are differences on how it could be better.

huge disappointment. Too much like Dennis Johnson.

A brilliant collection of dark, uncomfortable, somewhat-connected short stories that mediate mostly on grief, family, gardening, and the passage of time or life or both. Schutt's writing also possessed some perfectly crafted sentences that I read two or three times over to really get a feel for their nuance.