Customer Reviews

The Age of Miracles

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I've read all of Ellen Gilchrist's work, and THE AGE OF MIRACLES is my favorite. The subjects of the short stories vacillate between serious and quirky, but each one is intriguing in its own way. Gilchrist lends a distinct personality to her writing that few authors have the capacity to exude. I also recommend FLIGHTS OF ANGELS.

I'm not normally a short story reader, but I love most of Ellen Gilchrist's short stories -- especially her characters Rhoda Manning, Miss Crystal and Miss Crystal's maid Traceleen. This particular collection of Gilchrist's work is, in my opinion, her best and the easiest to lose yourself in. All in all, it's a fine representative sampling of her work if you've never encountered it before.

Other short story collections by Gilchrist I'd recommend are "Rhoda: A Life in Stories", and "Drunk with Love".

Nobody should read this book, unless you're a lonely woman who enjoys harlequin romance and wants to make yourself feel worse. This collection of stories are about the same main character, Rhoda, a wanna-be writer with loose morals. This prose is not innovative at all, but rather a desperate attempt to make sense of something I'm not interested in. The book suffers from the flaws of both bad novels and bad short story collections. The stories are about the same person but not ordered chronologically. Skip this author and read the true masters of modern fiction like Morrison or Proulx.