Bark

 This just didn't work for me. It was not necessarily badly written, but short stories are so very hard to get just right, and I don't feel like these managed at all.  I'm not sure I can honestly say I liked a single one of them, though I came close with a few of them. And then they ended. Mostly abruptly and without warning, without wrapping anything up, without, I felt, saying anything. Some of them, perhaps even worse, just went on and on, and I found myself hoping they would get to a point, any point, even a depressing point, but they never did.  They were also depressing. Now, there are lots of different reactions to depressing things. I do enjoy a well-written tragic scene, but none of these were tragic, they were just bleak. I don't really enjoy bleak with no point; perhaps it is a failing in my reading, but I want bleakness in a story to mean something, not to exist as though that is the natural state of affairs for everyone. Even if I truly believed it was (I don't), I go to books to give me something I don't see in real life. All of these characters could have been on a corner waiting for a bus somewhere; I might pass them by every day. These are the sorts of stories I would write for them in my head when I was depressed and watching them out the window in the rain on a very dark day, and that is not what I want in my stories.  They seem to get high reviews from many people, and as an author she comes highly recommended, but I think I am going to firmly put this and perhaps other books by her in the "not for me" category and move on.