Customer Reviews

Everybody Loves Somebody

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Author Joanna Scott, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize with The Manikin, brings the reader captivating tales in Everybody Loves Somebody.

Her book is a collection of ten short stories that parade across the 20th century, telling sagas of love; those who find it, those who lose it, and those who keep looking.

A full spectrum of relationships is brought to the page, including love between couples, love between parents and children, and love among siblings. Many different forms of love--and the breathtaking results, struggles, and stings suffered because of love--are captured. Romantic love is not the only story within the pages of this book, rather a love that comes through struggles and the search for a tie with another human being.

Armchair Interviews says: The depth that only love can bring to a soul is captured within the pages of Everybody Loves Somebody.

Scott writes nicely enough that just about any of her short stories are worth reading. However, the only ones that really have weight are the stores dense with plot: particularly "Or Else" , and also "The Lucite Cane". I recently read Kazuo Ishiguro's "Nocturnes", and I believe his collection better illustrates what can be accomplished in a short story.

After reading Follow Me, I had very high expectations for the remainder of Scott's books. In this collection of short stories, her writing really focuses on character sketches more than narrative, despite that fact that her ability to weave together plot lines into a cohesive story is second-to-none.

After my initial disappointment that the stories were not as compelling as what I found in Follow Me, I realized that this collection was a good resource for me as a writer. I spent a lot of time focused on her description of characters - the way they moved, spoke, smelled, dressed, and behaved. Rather than feeling like an outside observing a situation unfolding, I found that I was very much side by side with the characters, learning about their unqiue personality quirks and histories.

As a writer, this book was very helpful to me from a character study point-of-view. It answers all of the questions that an author must consider to create characters that truly spring from the page. It reminded me of break-outs you might read in preparation for a theatre performance. They are the back stories for colorful characters who could each easily be made into their own full-length novels. I finished each story wanting to know more about these people I had just met and was disappointed to not learn more about their them.

Reviewed by Shalley Malchoir for Reader Views (1/07)

Joanna Scott, world-renowned author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, has compiled a collection of ten short stories. The stories span from World War One, all the way down to the present day. The stories all tell tales of heartache, heartbreak, and true love. Scott has a timeless way of telling a tale, and this book is sure to become a classic. Each story has a quiet simplicity to it, a commodity often unseen today.

From the first story, in which a ne'er do well father finds himself trapped in the bathroom of the hotel in which he is staying, unable to atone for his past sins and attend his daughter's wedding, the reader has a sense that Scott is speaking not merely from her imagination, but, rather, that she has an uncanny ability to peer into the inmost parts of the human heart, and define what resides within. No theme is too tense, or too sacred for Scott to analyze and interpret. From lives in the tenements of New York to a beautiful wedding on a bright, sunny ocean beach, to drunken bouts, prostitution, old age, and an infant making a feast out of a cicada shell, Scott weaves ten powerful tales of love and loss. Not only is romantic, passionate love related, as in the kiss that lasts near a half-hour, but also love for family, friends, and the human race.

Although, at times, the stories in "Everybody Loves Somebody" seem a bit "wordy," Scott has a knack for taking ordinary words and sentences, and converting them into beautiful, timeless, haunting tales that the reader will not soon forget.

Received book free of charge.