Title: Series of flat short stories pretending to be a book
Product review: I think I'll have to start ignoring reviews. Many critics raved on about The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which turns out to be a slim collection of largely flat short stories pretending to be a book. The main problem with Jane, the heroine, is that she isn't very interesting. This leaves a large hole at the centre of the work, one so large in fact that it devours everything else. We meet her as a sassy teenager and then she moves on from one tedious romance to the next -- and suddenly she is married with kids -- and then we're back to the tedious romances -- and suddenly someone has cancer and we think it's Jane -- and we're back to the romances. It all reads as though someone pressed the "Random play" button on an album and we get the various chapters in no particular order. The writing is crisp and there were a couple of occasions where I laughed out loud, yet none of this can compensate for the vacuum at the centre of the story.
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