Customer Reviews

An Hour in Paradise: Stories

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I read this collection I couldn't help but find myself in a world where I felt I played an individual role in the lives of the characters in each story. This world where the stories end much too soon but, each with its own independent soul, live on forever could only be created, in this stylish, witty manner by Joan Leegant. Her writing lifts itself off each page and lets us be the flies on the wall that we always dream of being when discovering a new author.

You will find yourself wrestling with the concepts of a Higher Power and what it puts before us in life and death. From the surprises and mysteries of love to belligerent foreign neighbors, each story of An Hour in Paradise shows us everything we need to know about perceiving past events in life and somehow leaves room to teach us how to learn from and cope with the teachings to come. I think we may expect great things from Joan Leegant, and, as a young reader, I think her writings have shown me a thing or two of what I might expect from myself.

Real human emotions, sometimes set up in a magical way, sometimes in the most prosaic, are the subject of Joan Leegant's An Hour in Paradise. She is able to draw out our sympathies, our hopes, and even our disdain, for her characters, whether we like them or not. For example, I could feel for the poor schlepper who found himself lost in Sefad, even though I could not and probably will not ever like him or identify with him. I certainly did not like the Yeshiva student, but his difficulty is universal, although drawn in a narrow situation. A writer who can draw my emotions for a character I find dull, ordinary, or despicable, is doing her job, doing it very well indeed. I spent many hours in paradise reading and discussing An Hour in Paradise.

This book is a real treasure!

I began each story in this collection with eager anticipation and was never disappointed. Each is a gem. Finding a new author you love is always exciting and this is an author to watch. The book is a great gift as well! I bought several!

Leegant's book of stories is one of the freshest and most talented collections to come out. An excellent storyteller, her major accomplishment lies in her ability to express dramatic irony through character; and though she has a marvelous way with language, it is the characters of her book who set her apart as more than just another confident wordsmith. From the first page, One Hour in Paradise is no simple chemistry set of standard fiction writing techniques applied to the page. It is a unique and ambitious and highly skilled exploration into the problem of how religious faith, living religious faith, survives and fits into the modern world-a complex vision informed by Leegant's astute understanding of human character, of story-telling, and of modern Judaism. Infused with her as-always breath-taking enthusiasm for tackling difficult questions, for re-opening easy answers and for tearing down unusable stereotypes, her stories offer new keyholes through which to view a world that, for both Jews and gentiles alike, has been locked away too often behind layers of historical residue and dust. In short, Leegant has written a book that MOVES.

Excellent reading for diverse audiences - Engrossing, moving, and sparks the reader's curiosity!

I was very drawn to the notion of a collection of short stories with Jewish characters - since I am one myself. Unfortunately, and there is no kind way of saying this - this is a writer without talent - not a smidgen. She prattles, endlessly piling on pointless colorless details. She digresses, she's chummy, she's boring. The net effect is narcotic. It was a struggle to finish her tedious stories - and, to tell the truth, I finally gave up after reading several. If there is a gem in that collection, I missed it..

This author says she teaches writing at Harvard. That is very unfortunate. She may have single handedly decimated a generation of writers by putting them to sleep.

Pick up a book by Isaac Bashavis Singer or Phillip Roth or Norman Mailer if you want to read about Jewish characters... .... "An Hour in Paradise" was more like a week in Bakersfield.... with all due respect to Philadelphia.