A review by zoemig
The Dark and Other Love Stories by Deborah Willis
3.0
After adoring her first collection when it was released in 2010, I was really looking forward to The Dark and Other Love Stories by Deborah Willis. While I also enjoyed these stories, they have a quiet elegance and emotion to them, I found them less consistently magical than the previous collection. Still, Willis' take on love in its many forms are often beautiful and subtle at the same time, in particular those that deal with coming-of-age, which, while not always feeling realistic, have a dark and surreal beauty to them.
In the title story, The Dark, two girls at summer camp sneak away at night, while in Welcome to Paradise, two teenage best friends start breaking into houses during a boring summer. There are some weird stories, like Girlfriend on Mars about a guy whose girlfriend applies for a reality show where she will be sent to Mars, but they still manage to work. There was some repetition in theme: best female friends doing things they aren't supposed to, a teenage girl with an uncomfortable relationship with an older male, but the stories felt different enough. It is also always special to read stories set in Canada.
I didn't care as much for the historical fiction, like Last One to Leave, about a woman who works at a rural newspaper and a Ukrainian immigrant, or most of the stories with older men, like Hard Currency, about a novelist who revisits his homeland of Russia, and Steve and Lauren: Three Love Stories, three short stories that tie together to tell important moments in the relationship of a relationship. I think the issue with these stories is that despite the lovely writing, I really do not care about the characters, and they weren't dark and mysterious enough to intrigue me either. That said, throughout The Dark and Other Love Stories, Willis' writing is thoughtful and beautiful, the words feel sharp and carefully placed, so although this collection was uneven for me, I am still glad that I read it.
In the title story, The Dark, two girls at summer camp sneak away at night, while in Welcome to Paradise, two teenage best friends start breaking into houses during a boring summer. There are some weird stories, like Girlfriend on Mars about a guy whose girlfriend applies for a reality show where she will be sent to Mars, but they still manage to work. There was some repetition in theme: best female friends doing things they aren't supposed to, a teenage girl with an uncomfortable relationship with an older male, but the stories felt different enough. It is also always special to read stories set in Canada.
I didn't care as much for the historical fiction, like Last One to Leave, about a woman who works at a rural newspaper and a Ukrainian immigrant, or most of the stories with older men, like Hard Currency, about a novelist who revisits his homeland of Russia, and Steve and Lauren: Three Love Stories, three short stories that tie together to tell important moments in the relationship of a relationship. I think the issue with these stories is that despite the lovely writing, I really do not care about the characters, and they weren't dark and mysterious enough to intrigue me either. That said, throughout The Dark and Other Love Stories, Willis' writing is thoughtful and beautiful, the words feel sharp and carefully placed, so although this collection was uneven for me, I am still glad that I read it.