Thursday 18 September 2008

Breathing Underwater

I am reading Julie Orringer's How to Breathe Underwater at the moment, and loving it! The book is a collection of short stories, a genre I tend to distance myself from, only because I like the neat package of a novel contained within the covers. I have often feared a disparate collection of stories, or, even worse, a book of stories so similar as to be repetitions of their counterparts.

Orringer banished my (apparently unfounded) fears by the end of the second story. The stories do have multiple common themes, water being the obvious one, but also youth, loss, and illness. That said, it is not a dark book, but more a compulsive and addictive set of stories, set in various parts of the US. It is a quick read, with vivid imagery and honest narrators, and I will be saddened later today when I finish the last story. I may even have to turn right back to page one and start again!

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