"An unusual mix of stories"

I choose to reveiw this book because the intial excerpt of the first story entitled The Glass Heart grabbed my attention. True to the exerpt I read, the book did manage to keep my attention for most of the stories. I thought that the majority of the stories were written in an easy to read, easy to follow format.

One story that did not follow the easy to read format was entitled The Profundity of Madness. This story I found hard to follow due to the sentence structure of the story, and that made it a bit less enjoyable a read.

The story called Letters From Home I thought was particulary interesting. The father wrote letters to his wife and children, while being estranged from them all. I had the feeling that he was trying to make up for mistakes he had made...although a little too little, a lot too late.

There was one longer story entitled A Special Place. I really enjoyed the character development that the longer story could afford that a short story can't offer. It is the story of Daisy Jo Starr. She's the daughter of Reverend Martin Starr and Sarah Starr. Daisy's life hasn't been the typical preacher kid life that I think of. Due to this I found myself wanting to revisit the heroine many years later to see if she had truly overcome her unfortunate beginnings.

THE GLASS HEART (A Collection of Short Stories...and Such) is a compilation of contemporary short stories with a few poems thrown in. I would not consider this book to fall into the romance genre, which I mainly read, but did find it to be a nice read. Being a collection of short stories you would not have to read it all in one sitting, but could read it between other books. I look forward to reading other compilations put together by Robert Edward Levin.

Reviewed by Sandi Shilhanek
Posted September 25, 2002

Summary

Whether running from the darkness of a haunting past, searching for reason in the face of madness, giving others the gift of hope, or ignoring the sum of life, waiting instead for something better to come along, THE GLASS HEART offers a wonderful variety of stories where the heartfelt and the heartless meet.