A review by kylegarvey
Love and Obstacles by Aleksandar Hemon

4.0

Hemon's memoir-ish short stories have very few flaws -- they're all exciting and deeply-felt and very well expressed (even when that expression might have been hindered by the thesaurus-sounding vocabulary of a non-native speaker, the effect is quirky and cute more than anything else). Only, I wish he'd crafted this book as an actual memoir, or at least a novel, and not a collection of discrete stories. Some of them seem too samey -- wonderful on their own, but a little tiring together -- and his habit of basing stories on paraphrases of others' material, whether just a page or two or as the entire frame of the thing, might fit better in a longer work.