Customer Reviews

I Knew You'd Be Lovely

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In high school and college English majors are often made to read the short story. I am grateful for this fact. "Parker's Back" by O'Conner, Faulkner's "Barn Burnings" and Miss Emily's Rose" are examples of the vignette medium that powerfully moved me. But, as a whole, for the past 50 years, I have mainly read novels, selfishly demanding more; more experience.; more in-depth character study; more profound connection. Alethea Black, the author of "I Knew You Would Be Lovely" brought me back to the pleasure of condensed brilliance. Thirteen vignettes of life are proffered in this short story collection; multiple insights into relationships with oneself, with friends, with family and with one's truths left me deeply stirred.

Of course I had my favorites...."Mollusks Make A Comeback." Katie, a woman afraid to try for more spoke solemnly through humor and jarred an "aha moment" so profound in me I am still shaking. What more can you demand of a story? Other favorites...."Someday is Today," "The Summer Before" and "Good In A Crisis" All thirteen invoked emotions and understanding I didn't know myself capable of. What more can be asked of a well crafted tale?

Alethea Black talent lies in her balance, intuitiveness, tenderness, sarcastic wit, shock value, humor and compassion. How could I ask anything more from a genius wordsmith?

Read at your own risk knowing par writing will most probably not be enough for you again. When you read extraordinary it is hard to lower that bar back down.

Thanks, Ms. Black, for insights and inspirations into your stories conceptions and birth.

In homage to "We've Got a Great Future Behind" us I simply sing, "it's close enough to perfect for me."

If I had been given but one story to read by the amazing Alethea Black, it would have been pleasure, indeed. However to receive a book holding 13 of her stories is almost too fine to be true. Black is a writer of rare talent with keen insights, precise craftsmanship, and understanding of human predicaments. Her short story collection I KNEW YOU'D BE LOVELY is a reminder of the beauty to be found in brevity.

It would be an impossibility to select a favorite or the one this reader considers to be the most splendid among Black's stories as each is a gem, its facets alive with rich details as her characters face decisions that may permanently alter their lives. The opening piece, "That Of which We Cannot Speak," introduces Bradley who reluctantly attends a New Year's Eve party where he meets a brunette with a clipboard hanging around her neck, "I can't speak, it said at the top of a sheet of paper. I have laryngitis." Amazing what can happen as notes are passed back and forth.

Black demonstrates her versatility and ability to explore the minds of young, old and in between with her second story, "The Only Way Out Is Through," sharing the thoughts of a father of a troubled son as they go on an ill-advised camping trip. In "Good In A Crisis" Ginny is a dissatisfied school teacher who well remembers her favorite teacher, "His classroom had all the elegance and electricity hers lacked." She wonders if he is still alive; if so, is he married? She decides to try and find him

The title story concerns a young couple, Hannah and Tom. As his birthday nears she wants to find the perfect present. At the same time she's a bit perturbed by letters that have begun arriving for him from a woman he met six months ago at a writing seminar in Prague. As the letters continued, "Hannah found herself resenting the postman and rethinking his holiday bonus...." But, what could she or should she do?

Alethea Black's collection of stories is very much like that proverbial box of chocolates - all are very different and each is totally delicious.

- Gail Cooke

Short story collections can be tough. Of those I've read, it's the rare instance when I love most or all of those contained in a volume. Even if I'm a huge fan of a particular writer.

But even if there is only one story that touches or moves you, it's worth your time. Such may be the case with this collection. Sampling these stories is the equivalent of stepping out of your comfort zone to try different types of dance, theater or music. You never know.

This author grabbed my gut and heart with her first story in this volume, "That of Which We Cannot Speak," a story I could relate to on so many levels. Sometimes it feels as if an author has been observing your own life and chronicling it, but of course injecting far more intriguing and witty dialogue! The challenge of what to say, and when, and how to say it, is sweetly played out here with a clever device.

I laughed, again with recognition, through "We've Got a Great Future Ahead of Us." If you've ever worked with creative types, you'll relate to this piece about two songwriters who reunited at the behest (well, maybe a bit of emotional blackmail is involved here, but for a good cause) of a former associate.

I reread "Proof of Love" twice but it still left me bewildered. Just could not relate to the characters or the situation.

Overall, I feel this collection may resonate more for younger, female readers in terms of the situations and the characters. It's hard to review short stories since it's often not about writing style, or tone, or even POV. For me, it's a case of a/can I relate; b/it makes me see something in a whole new way; c/it makes me laugh or d/it touches my heart. Quite a few of these stories met that criteria.

It was hard to really find a theme or overall POV on these.

It took me quite a few sessions to get thru the book. It just didn't grab me enough to keep going although there were lines of dialogue or setups in almost every story that I noted. (Sometimes the clever titles were more intriguing than the actual stories. Perhaps the titles raised my expectations.)

A big plus, and something I greatly enjoyed, were the Author's notes, which provided a bit of backstory.

Depending on your life, you may find these stories far more interesting than I did.

So, come without expectations, and see where the words and stories take you. You really have nothing to loose, given these quick reads. There's bound to be one or more that will make it worth your while.

Every now and then, a debut short story collection appears that makes me sit up and take notice - Interpreter of Maladies, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, and You Are Not A Stranger here, to name three. Alethea Black has taken her place as a short story writer who shows amazing promise.

Some of the stories in I Knew You'd Be Lovely are very good and others are excellent. There are none that are bad. She writes like a dream, summing up the unpredictable human condition with insight and perceptive and more often than not, a subtle sense of humor.

It took me two-thirds of the way until I had that "eureka" moment: "Aha, this is a book about beginnings." Take her story That Of Which We Cannot Speak, for example. Bradley, a man who is struggling to find his way back to center after his marriage implodes, meets an attractive doctor with laryngitis at a noisy party. They communicate with a clipboard and, in an unspoken way, find a connection.

Or take the story The Only Way Out Is Through. An accidental father takes his very emotionally disturbed son on a camping trip. An act of impending horror is the catalyst for him to reveal the magical time of the son's birth, ending with, "Sometimes you don't know what you want until you get it."

Or, one of my favorites, Good In A Crisis. Ginny, an aloof teacher, is resolved to avoid marriage at all costs, supporting her aversion with specific examples: a good friend's husband taped The X-Files over their wedding videos. Eventually, she finds her way to her first crush, her older and still attractive and single high school teacher. The story of their meeting is real and poignant and fresh a Ginny starts "climbing the stairs - very slowly, like a woman sleepwalking, incapable of imaging the dream that awaits her when she wakes up."

The title story I Knew You'd Be Lovely, focuses on Hannah, a woman who is searching for the perfect gift for Tom, one this is "prescient, ingenious, unique, unforgettable." I won't spoil the fun in revealing what that "gift" turns out to be.

At the end of the book, Alethea Black writes, "I love it when authors share the backstories to stories and snippets about their creative process." And she proceeds to do just that, letting the reader know what inspired her to write each story.

Except one.

That story closes the collection and it's called Someday is Today, a highly personal and poignant story about the death of her young brother-in-law and a potentially life-altering decision that her sister requests of her. It is a beautifully-written and in its own way, it, too, is about new beginnings.

The thirteen stories in this slim but satisfying debut collection deal, as so much contemporary fiction does, with characters bowing under the weight of ordinary tragedies and confusions: a broken marriage, a troubled teenager, a midlife crisis, a widowed sister. Some offer the small epiphanies of minimalist fiction, while others are slices of life. Alethea Black avoids the dull-as-dishwater quality of less than successful stories of this type by presenting characters who are quirkily funny without losing the human touch (one plans to rewrite the Bible in the style of Dr. Seuss-- a hilarious sample is provided), and with her own dry voice, which finds the humor in unbearable grief, divorced sniping, and sincere religious faith. In a few cases the epiphanies feel forced or excessively on-the-nose, but generally they capture the transitory nature of life without feeling pat or saccharine. The prose is occasionally a little awkward, but to a remarkable extent Black has found a distinctive style and made it her own. Story notes by the author reflect her gift for recognizing powerful moments and translating them into fiction.

Ideally, I'd give this 3 1/2 stars. There are moments and lines I like a lot--a conversation with a pawnbroker in one of the best stories comes to mind. But few of the stories really had an emotional impact on me and there was too much similarity among the character types in the stories. They're well-written but mostly felt unnatural to me.

A technique used several times annoyed me. The bulk of the story describes a brief period of time, then a paragraph appears telling you what happened years later. I'd rather just have the snapshot of the moment, or a novel if what happens years later is considered important to the story.

Overall, I consider the book a hint of things to come. I enjoyed the author's comments on the background of the stories.

If you don't usually read short stories, consider making an exception for this entertaining little collection.
There are plenty of good reasons to read these stories, but the best reason of all is just for pure delight. Alethea Black is someone you'd like to have for a friend so you could enjoy her playful nature and the funny lines she loves to share. Every day when I sat down to read a story or two, I couldn't wait to find out what new way she'd find to delight me.

There are thirteen stories in this collection. Some are hilarious, some deeper and more sorrowful. Even the stories with a more serious tone contain an element of play and a joy in the creative use of language. Black finds fresh and surprising ways to present a serious message. In "That of Which We Cannot Speak" she addresses the banality of small talk using a character with laryngitis who shows up at a party with a clipboard around her neck for writing what she needs to say.

There are a couple of themes that seem to run through many of the stories. One theme follows the consequences of not being entirely honest with those closest to us. We don't get what we need because we withhold the truth. In "The Laziest Form of Revelation," we see how being naked in front of someone is a cheap substitute for sharing your authentic self.

The second theme in the collection is that of characters on the verge of something new in life---maybe something better, maybe just something different. In "Mollusk Makes a Comeback," Katie is a young woman for whom Murphy's Law seems to have been custom-made. But by the end of the story, you know her hopeful nature will help her keep believing she's "just about to get to the good part."

The author's notes about each story are a wonderful and revealing addition. She shares how she got the ideas for her stories and some of her process in writing them.

While outside the pantheon of the types of stories I have been reading lately, each story in "I Knew You'd be Lovely" took me back to the days of college literature courses where a disproportionate number of the short stories I read affected me deeply.

Each story in this collection is a tiny world all its own. They are amazingly, blissfully complete and, while they say to leave them wanting more at the end of short stories, they are also very satisfying. There is no one story so like another that it seems like a retread.

Here's the list of the stories published in this collection:

That of Which We Cannot Speak
The Only Way Out is Through
Good in a Crisis
The Thing Itself
The Laziest Form of Revelation
The Summer Before
Mollusk Makes a Comeback
I Knew You'd be Lovely
Proof of Love
We've Got a Great Future Behind Us
Double-Blind
The Far Side of the Moon
Someday is Today

The stories are memorable, heartbreaking, stimulating, exciting, humorous, honest, and thought provoking - more frequently all of these within a single story.

Frankly, I'm hard-pressed to pick a favorite (a great problem to have), but "The Summer Before" gave me my strongest reaction: when the youngest sister was left on the dock, it made me relive the feeling of abandonment you can only get from older siblings. Alethea Black was able to do all that for me from the perspective of one of the older sisters and without sentimentality.

I think that shows true talent, and there are more examples of her powerful abilities on practically every page of this book. This is real literature.

I received this book at no cost as a member of the Vine Program.

Alethea Black has somehow found the secret of turning emotions into words and then getting them onto pages.

Short stories are not usually my favorite form of reading material. I usually get to the end of the stories and feel like there are huge holes that will never be filled - because only the author knows what should have gone in those holes. But Black binds all the stories in this collection up neatly and I don't feel like I'm left hanging. Each word is just right - great wordsmithing.

I loved "Good in a Crisis" - yea to all out Mr. Hennesseys (or our dreams of them); "The Summer Before" - I was always Lindsay; "Mollusk Makes a Comeback" - another part of my life; "I Knew You'd Be Lovely" - perfectly written story; and "Someday is Today" - heartwrenching.

I appreciated the author's notes on her stories. They provided insight into the stories - and the author.

Perhaps Ms. Black will find it a disservice to her spellbinding collection of short stories to suggest a theological context, but the collection of vignettes in "I Knew You'd Be Lovely" suggest a certain transcendence of time in particular. It is not that I think they are in some manner 'eternal' or some other trite attribution, but rather that two themes, time and love, are interwoven through the collection.

Recollection and expectation operate as a tension in a number of the stories: "The Only Way Out Is Through" offers a present narrative, of a father and a very difficult, withdrawn teenage son, grounded in each the father's past and the son's future. The father's hope contrasts the son's nihilism, while the reader is given a glimpse of what the future holds in a nearly casual way. "Good In A Crisis" paints a picture of a teacher who unconsciously lives to please her own teacher, an idealized and imagined mentor, and then speculates as to what the imagined becomes when realized. "The Thing Itself" is a story of revelation, of doubt and cloudiness breached by a nearly paranormal sense of ESP, where the character's own "a-ha" moment allows the reader to have his or her own similar moment.

While the very last story, "Someday Is Today", is the one which caused me to sit down and pour a glass of Scotch and reflect on the pain of loss and the complexity of family relationships and the identity we assume as the result of being around those we love, or want to love, it is the story which serves as the title for the collection which is my favorite: "I Knew You'd Be Lovely" is at once heart-wrenching in its brief examination of love and possession and nearly comic in its unfolding. Here again, the narrative suggests the future recollection of an event about to be described in the present.

These stories demand to be read one at a time, not in context of each other, but rather each as their own entity. The 'collection', such as it is, is a fine box in which to place a set of jewels, some brighter than others, but none a set. They each hint at something transcendent of the moment in which they occur, and just like any good hermeneutic text, they leave much to the imagination; they each beg of exposition, of what precedes and what follows. Fortunately, as shorts rather than novels, they allow the reader to engage in the exposition.

Amusingly, Ms. Black offers a few paragraphs on each story as an appendix. She enters into a bit of the conversation about each one, and I would encourage ignoring these notes until, perhaps, you've read each story twice, and had a few moments to absorb them. There is great pleasure here; not cheap or easy, but rich. If God is transcendent and is, by many theologies, the exact definition of love, then this is a glimpse at an imagination of the desire we have to find God. God is not to be found here, but the longing certainly is.