As you all know by now, all of us at RWB loved Amy Bloom’s Away. It is one of our favorite books. Since we have the pleasure of Amy’s company on the 24th (Wednesday 7PM), I thought I would read one of her earlier books. I picked up Come To Me, her debut collection of stories and was happy to discover that her gift is just as strong with short stories as it is with a full length novel.
The running theme through this collection is love, in all its forms and all the ways by which we seek, destroy and nurture love. But this is by no means a fairy tale collection of maidens and princes with their happy ever after stories. Instead we have stories of flawed people struggling with death and crippling grief (Love is not a Pie, Sleepwalking and Semper Fidelis), madness and illness (Silver Water) and loneliness (Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines and When the Year Grows Old). What leavens the potential for despair is the luminous prose and the palpable sense of hope that permeates these stories. Underlying each story is the rich empathy with which Bloom writes. In this day and age where a true happy ending begins to seem like a myth, Bloom offers us stories of the next best thing—the possibility of happiness and that all important second chance.
The running theme through this collection is love, in all its forms and all the ways by which we seek, destroy and nurture love. But this is by no means a fairy tale collection of maidens and princes with their happy ever after stories. Instead we have stories of flawed people struggling with death and crippling grief (Love is not a Pie, Sleepwalking and Semper Fidelis), madness and illness (Silver Water) and loneliness (Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines and When the Year Grows Old). What leavens the potential for despair is the luminous prose and the palpable sense of hope that permeates these stories. Underlying each story is the rich empathy with which Bloom writes. In this day and age where a true happy ending begins to seem like a myth, Bloom offers us stories of the next best thing—the possibility of happiness and that all important second chance.
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