Depressing short stories. A lot of bad things happening to children. Hard to get through.

Collected stories from the author of The Giant’s House.

My favorites were Something Amazing, Thunderstruck and Juliet. I had a hard time getting into The Lost & Found of Department of Greater Boston.

I chose this story collection because it was referenced by instructors in two recent writing workshops. I had not read anything by Elizabeth McCracken before this, and wow, what a wonderful writer and storyteller. The prose was simply beautiful. Since I read this as an audiobook, I will need to get my hands on a written copy to find some of the sentences that most struck me and re-read them. In addition to her way with language, Ms. McCracken draws such rich characters -- real people whose motivations, desires, and weaknesses you discover with such clarity as each story unfolds. I strongly recommend this collection, and if you like audiobooks, this once is very well done. The narrator is great. I'm sure I would have loved it in written form, as well.

Once you have fallen so hard for someone’s work and gone on record for being kind of loony when it comes to it, new records or new books fill you with an odd sort of trepidation and excitement. What if it sucks? What if it sucks and then I have to rethink my entire system of belief? Oh my god, I hope it doesn’t suck. Please don’t suck, becomes a sort of chant you say as you flit through the songs on the latest record or turn the pages of the book.

I’m happy to report that Thunderstruck & Other Stories does not suck. Of course it doesn’t suck. Read more

interesting collection of short stories. ambiguous endings to almost all of them. some resonated, some did not. not a collection I'd return to again, but worth a read.

There are a few quirks I dislike about McKracken's stories - first, the way in which they inevitably and somewhat abruptly end at an unsatisfying juncture that leaves the reader unsettled, and secondly, that the perspective always shifts to a character's who we haven't had access to before just so we get a glimpse of the "truth" or facts the protagonist of the story isn't aware of. McKracken relies on these two elements in not all but nearly every story in this collection, which ends up making what are beautiful pieces feel just a shade more trite. That being said, these are beautiful stories and I loved this reading experience. I was struck by how original almost every one felt - the world of each felt fully fleshed out and I found myself wholly absorbed.

These nine stories all focus on loss of some kind--death, injury, end of a friendship, etc. My personal favorites were Something Amazing, Hungry, and Thunderstruck. What I thought was interesting about her stories is that I often found that who I thought would be the main character from the beginning of the story ends up not being the main character as I kept reading. She has a way of twisting the story around like that to have your focus travel to different places. I never found myself to be a "short story" fan but between this, Tenth of December, and Bark this year, they've been some of the best reading I've done in 2014.

I wanted to love this collection -- but where the blurb describes the stories as falling "between love and loneliness" it seems to me that the stories are fundamentally about loss and grief. While they're beautifully crafted, I found little or none of the humor and empathy that might have leavened them.

These stories just didn't catch me or hook me at all.