Customer Reviews

Wide Eyed (Little House on the Bowery)

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

 

 

One of the best short fiction books to come out in years. Don't bother reading the summaries because they make the book sound like the rantings of a space case. But I swear the prose comes together to create a series of gorgeous moments that come together into a beautiful, fun, and sad whole. My girlfriend and I read these stories out loud to each other as bedtime stories, and both of us read it on our own. If you like Dave Eggers, Denis Johnson, Isabel Allende, or David Sedaris, I can recommend this book. And if you hate those guys, read this as an alternative.

I love these stories because they almost make me feel uncomfortable in some lines and mystical in others. These are the stories of our own lives, the things many of us experience growing up or in the day to day but that we usually don't bring back up to the surface---moments of awkwarness, of embarrasment, of unthinkable thought and action-subliminal. These stories gather all the little isolated absurdist thoughts we create and never share, that we think our own and we are confronted with them right up front. And, then just when you think you can't look in the mirror any longer, Ms. Dalton pulls the magic out in strands---the moments of luster that come through murk---the fantasy, the spiritual, the moments of solitary joy and emergence. A lovely, lovely book!

This is an uneven group of interrelated stories that run from childish to bizarre. The absolute best thing about this book is the cover art. While not exactly "chick lit" or "coming-of-age", it has elements of both. It just didn't seem to have any oomph. I got the impression that she wrote these on rainy afternoons to have something to do and then put them together into a book.

The book isn't really all that bad. I did give it three stars. I just never seemed to care whether I started the next story or not, even though I did read every page. Dalton has writing talent and she needs to try writing something with a real plot and real characters.