Genre: Short
Story Collection
Description:
“The stories in the Filled In Spaces investigate the intersecting
lives of strangers and acquaintances, acknowledging that we are all a
background character in someone else’s story. The stories investigate the
nature of relationships and friendships.”
Author:
“Michael Overa was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. After
completing his MFA at Hollins University Michael returned to Seattle where he
currently works as a writing tutor and is a writer-in-residence with Seattle's
Writers In The Schools Program.”
Appraisal:
The last few short story collections I’ve read have had stories that
fell flat for me. The Filled in Spaces
ended that streak. These stories were all interesting, entertaining, and didn’t
leave me wondering why the author had bothered writing them. They tend to be on
the darker side with characters living on the edges of society, so if you’re
looking for inspirational stories or a certain kind of character that doesn’t
fit that, these stories might not be for you. But if you like that sort of
thing (I obviously do) then they’re very good stories.
Unfortunately, if you’re the kind of reader who gets thrown out of a
story due to typos, missing or wrong words, obvious misspellings, or obvious
grammar errors that didn’t get fixed in the final product, this book is
ABSOLUTELY NOT for you. If it went through a copyediting or proofreading
process, then that process fell well short of what it should have accomplished.
In fact, if these stories were even run through a word processor’s spell check
function, I’d be amazed.
FYI:
Some adult language and situations.
Format/Typo
Issues:
The copyediting and proofreading on this were … well, really, they
weren’t.
Rating:
*** Three Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate
word count: 35-40,000 words
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