Reviews for Life's Little Ironies

The average rating for Life's Little Ironies based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-23 00:00:00 James Leese Sometimes everything goes wrong. Or in the case of this book, everything always goes wrong. It was weird how I enjoyed thinking of all the ways the story could go south. I'm not a masochist - I did have to read a flufferoony simultaneously to counter-balance all the unhappy endings, but I see that excellent unhappy endings are very satisfying - and, of course, Hardy has wonderful verisimilitude and control over his plots. I thoroughly enjoyed having this sort of "Collection of Bad Ends". Some of them were quite humourous. The one about the evenly matched couples, for instance. I'm beginning to see that all my grousing about short stories is really missing the mark. It's not that I don't like them, it's that I only like a certain kind, this kind. Hardy manages to hook my interest and draw characters and scenes and themes that feel bigger than the sum of their pages. Also, he places them in a continuum of some kind - here with the person asking for news of his old town-folk, and with the theme of irony. It gives a sense of depth that I often miss in other short stories. Anyway - I highly recommend.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-03-01 00:00:00 Pam Kamholz Thomas Hardy never fails to grab my attention with the descriptive passages of the countryside. I loved them all and found 'The Son's Veto' to be Hardy's favourite. A few crusted characters was wonderful in the fact it had a returning narative. Wonderful characters and some very sad tales.