Title: Separate Kingdoms: StoriesAuthor: Valerie Laken
Genre: Short stories, adult
Publication: February 2011
Source: For Review, TLC Book Tours
Separate Kingdoms is a collection of eight very diverse short stories taking place in both Russia and the U.S. with a wide variety of characters and narrators. While I'm not much of a big short story reader, I was intrigued by the premise of many of these stories and am overall pleased that I gave this book a chance.
My favorite story was one titled 'Family Planning', about an American lesbian couple over in Russia trying to adopt a baby. Meg is reluctant and indifferent about the experience, while her partner, Josie, is enthusiastic and overly hopeful. When they are shown two separate babies that are available for adoption, it is clear that they both want a different baby. I loved the dynamics in this story and the differences between the two women. You could really sense Josie's desperation and Meg's indifference.
I also really enjoyed the story called 'Map of the City,' which takes place in Russia in 1991, and is from the point of view of an American student abroad. It focuses a lot on the various relationships she forms while there, as well as the riots and big changes that are occurring in the city.
The writing throughout the book is eloquent and polished to near perfection. I must say, I both admire and envy Valerie Laken's beautiful writing style and immense talent. She is able to perfectly capture so many different voices in this book in a simplistic but elegant manner. Her writing style is really astounding and these stories make you think. I can truly say I enjoyed all of these stories except for one of them, 'Before Long.' To me, that story didn't seem to really go anywhere.
My only problem with this book lies in the endings of almost all of the stories, if you could even really call them endings. All of these stories just abrubtly stop, leaving too many questions unanswered which really frustrated me. I would become invested in the stories and the people in them, and then BAM, no more. Though they're not necessarily my favorite, I can definitely appreciate ambiguous endings that leave things up to the reader, but these stories just didn't seem finished to me. Because of that, my rating is slightly decreased.
If you're a fan of short stories or multi-cultural books, I think you'd really like this one and I could highly recommend it.
My Rating: 3.5/5
I've found that in many short story collections the endings of each story are left "unfinished" by the author. That's one of the things that bugs me about short stories, but it's also one of the things that gets my book club into some really great discussions - we're always trying to figure out what might happen next, and we usually don't agree.
ReplyDeleteThanks for being on the tour!
Never read a multi-cultural. This is a great to know Steph!
ReplyDeleteI have never been much for short stories; the only ones I have really enjoyed have be O.Henry, and Guy duMauppasant...I think your problem with the endings, getting invested, and then boom it's over, is sort of the way i feel about short stories in general :)
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