Review from OnlineBookClub.org
Another aspect that I like about this book is the uniqueness found in some of its short stories. Consider The Activist, for instance. The story doesn’t read like those I have read before. Told from the perspective of a young girl, this story has newness to it because it approaches activism from a very creepy angle.
Still on why I enjoyed reading this book, I like the sentences many stories here start with, specifically Dilemma, The Perennial Student, The War of Flies, The Stonecutter, The Cart Boy and On the Road to Yazoo City. In passing, below is the first sentence in the short story The War of Flies:
The summer when I was eight, the dead flies were so thick on Grandma’s porch that Mom swept them into piles and shoveled them into large plastic trash bags.
One more thing, the endings. I mean how most stories end in this book. Many endings here impressed me, more so Father Ryan’s. What Father Ryan does with a phone number written on a napkin exonerates him at last.