I've been pushing myself to read through short story collections completely, and this was the first one that I read through and felt that I didn't feel that I needed to slog through to get to the end.

Munro's better stories didn't feel front loaded (the title story, "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, "Family Furnishings" and "The Bear Came Over the Mountain") rather, they were evenly dispersed and even the ones that weren't as great ("Post and Beam" and "Queenie" IMO) still brought something valuable to the collection. She follows the ebb and flow of marriage, the private moments between husband, wife, and possible lover, and how their lives appear to others from the outside.

Overall, I enjoyed it, but I do wish there was more diversity among the couples featured in these stories (hetero, mostly white, all in Canada). Munro's prose didn't blow me away - I found it to be mostly serviceable, second to the characters she was developing. These stories run much longer than what I'm accustomed to, usually 30 to 40 pages in length, and were paced slowly, but each page was carefully crafted to develop characters who really felt like they existed outside of this collection.