Reviews for Innocence betrayed

The average rating for Innocence betrayed based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-18 00:00:00 William Frashet I haven't read much of Kennedy at all, but I don't think her style is like anyone else's: a combination of wit, reality, insight and sentence structure that is all her own. When I started reading this book, I was reminded of how much I previously admired, of all things, her use of colons! I don't think I've ever come across any writer who uses them so much and so well at the same time. These are my favorite kind of stories: being inside the character's head, all inward looking out. And, in fact, the most complex story, "White House at Night" (which I'm still thinking about: including trying to figure out why she chose the title she did: perhaps the Van Gogh painting of the same name has something to do with it) starts off with the main character trying to explain how it literally feels to live inside your head. Kudos to whomever selected the order of these stories, which couldn't have been more perfect. Each successive story lightly reflects and expands on the previous one: something that many short story collections just don't achieve. Many stories have a perfect ending line, usually due to one perfectly chosen word that chillingly reflects back to something earlier that you didn't realize was so important, until it was.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-12-13 00:00:00 Jeff Beerman Will keep this brief. I very much enjoy Kennedy's dark and witty writing style. Found myself wanting more... Having only briefly canoodled with the modern short story genre, I have come to the conclusion that the cryptic nature of it is not so much for me. I have found few exceptions. While I very much like a bit of open endedness in a plotline, if I wanted to write my own ending, I would write my own short story. Again, I do not believe this to be a shortcoming of the short story authors that I have read, but with the current state of the short story. I pine for days of Poe, The Yellow Wall Paper, and The Story of an Hour...