A review by tonythep
Come to Me: Stories by Amy Bloom

4.0

I really love the way Amy Bloom writes: spare, straightforward, to the point. She focuses on the right details, but doesn't allow you to linger too long on them. At first I felt that the stories in this, her first collection, were fairly dark. And while there is some tragedy here, she's not afraid to look beyond the tragedy and show us that life carries on. The darkness is accompanied by light. The heartache balanced by hope. But the intensity of both darkness and light is real. What people experience in their lives everyday. Perhaps what I initially took for darkness was merely gray. Cloudy with a chance of sunshine. The subject matter of these stories is loosely themed around domestic relationships: husbands and wives, parents and children. But there are two linked series of two and three stories respectively that are linked to each other as well. These particularly make me look forward to Bloom's latest collection.