Free: And Other Stories Book

I was hoping for a bit more from these stories. The author runs a program that encourages young people to write and self-publish their work, which is awesome. However, her own stories were just a little too unsubtle for my taste. To use Writing 101 terminology, there was a lot of telling rather than showing, and a lot of metaphorical language that hovered on the borderline of being really beautiful, but in most of the stories had a hard time making it to the other side of the line. The situations she depicted her African American characters in also seemed, ironically, stereotypical--too blatant, too expected, too "done." I'm hoping since this was published in 2002 that the author has refined her craft a bit, since there were those glimpses of promise throughout.