Customer Reviews

Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived

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3 star:		(1)
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None of these short stories are bad. However, just about all of them fail to live up their potential. Personally, I was expecting to gain a stronger sense of the locations in which these stories were set. Having read the first few, I realized that this was not the author's point. Instead it is to instill a feeling of being in limbo, i.e. a state of flux or transition. Unfortunately, I have experienced this to a greater extent in straight-up travel writing (Pico Iyer comes to mind). All of these stories are from a woman's point of view. I would have liked this collection more if the writer had tried to come at this from a male's perspective in at least a few stories. It would have been much more interesting to see the writer's thoughts about what constitutes a state of limbo for women versus men. Another disappointment is the rather redundant nature of the characters in these stories. The peripheral men, in general, are either weak and limp or abrassive, domineering, and boarder on abusive. While being in limbo is not exactly a zone of empowerment, the women themselves do not seem strong. They did not enter limbo as a strong women in their pasts, nor does the reader ever feel that any of these women will leave limbo with strength, will, and purpose. Overall, this collection receives three stars because the stories are readable, but not a book that I could recommend to someone.