Rag had been on my TBR for a long time, and expecting to love it, I thought when better than after a disappointing story collection, as a palate cleanser. To my dismay, I found nothing close to that in this book.

Instead, Rag was a disappointment of its own, the majority of the stories so boring and so badly executed that I kept checking how many pages were left when I was on the very first page of the story. I disliked the majority of these stories so much, they almost gave me a headache.

Out of the 14 stories, I only loved 1: the titular Rag, for its unique approach and strong feminist undertone. And while I ended up liking Evidence as well, it was not a great story — I’d even say it only scraped the ‘good story’ bar. Others like Viral and The Rainbow Baby were alright, but their execution did not manage to move me or truly capture my attention to begin with, as I felt that grating boredom creep at times.

While some like The Shut-In and Her Blood fell apart, others like Pool and The Lover only got better at the end. I still found myself bored throughout, which is a big issue seeing as Her Blood is the first story in the collection. It completely failed to set a tone for the book other than that of boredom and the compulsive page number checking.

The remaining 6 stories were unfortunately terrible beyond salvation.