A review by donttakemybooks
War Dances by Sherman Alexie

3.0

I love Sherman Alexie's writing and his narration is great. I will apologize in advance for not knowing titles to the stories. As a whole the short stories were funny and genuine and awkward and heartfelt. There is always something in them that pushed the bounds of comfortable, but in a subtle way, rather than a shock tactic. Paul Nonetheless is charming in spite of the fact that he's an awful father and husband. I rooted for him to hook up with the married Sarah Smile, even though he'd kind of lost it in the most middle-aged man way. George Wilson was also a sympathetic character, even though he beat an innocent kid to death and couldn't even explain to himself why it had happened that way. I had read some of these stories before as they are reprinted in Blasphemy, but I was again struck by the tenderness of the blanket story. My big complaints here had a lot to do with the audio production. The poetry didn't add anything for me and was hard to separate out from the short stories because it felt pretty prose-like. Also, there was hardly any pause between stories and some of the stories were told in numbered parts and it was hard to distinguish between separate works some of the time. Perhaps this was intentional, but it was confusing and as much as I like Alexie's narration and think it adds something to the reading experience, I almost wish I'd had the print to refer to so I could see how the stories were formatted there. All in all, I always recommend Alexie's writing/narration and this is no exception.