Reviews for Rovers return

The average rating for Rovers return based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-15 00:00:00 Haider Kazim A follow-up anthology to Children of Albion Rovers: An Anthology of New Scottish Writing that came out in 1998. Another six novellas. But only three are Scots this time. Joining the Scots are an Anglo, an American, and that Irish globetrotter Emer Martin, whose Breakfast in Babylon is a cracker of a novel. Her novella in this anthology, "Teeth Shall Be Provided," has some of the same characters as her novel More Bread or I'll Appear (and Ailsing is also in Babylon), but it is a completely different story and a fully realized novella in its own right. Great stuff. "The Weathers and their Famous Fathers" by Gordon Legge is Scottish piss taking at it's best. Stylistically a bit confusing at times, but it's still a hilarious portrayal of TV news. Legge spares no one. "Smoked" by James Meek is allegorical with an embedded commentary on history. Well written, but it didn't do much for me. "Chef's Night Out" by Anthony Bourdain (my, how he exploded after this!) is high-octane voice; imagine if Thom Jones (The Pugilist at Rest)had been a chef with an axe to grind. That's Bourdain in this story. The only thing I didn't like was the way he held the one detail to the ending; the writing is powerful enough that he didn't need to do that. The hook in the first paragraph is a thing of beauty. "Last Rites" by John King is interesting because each paragraph is a single sentence and blocked like a section. But on closer examination it's not a very interesting technique because all he does is punctuate each clause with a comma, and most of the clauses aren't dependent, so he could just as easily have ended them with periods and made sentences. The story itself is a Kafka-esque tale of a guy entering a Greek prison. The ending, with the character treating it as a beginning, was a bit forced, more a philosophical statement of how he might survive the experience than a strategy evolving from within the story. "Hope" by Laura Hird had an annoying trick ending, which undermined everything she'd accomplished up to then. Once again she is absolutely unflinching in portraying the failings of her characters. She revels in revealing the base motives and emotions beneath the veneer of the public persona. She shows no sympathy, no soft spot, for her characters, no authorial desire to protect her creations. That's a trait Hird shares with Martin, perhaps a reason I like them both: they know there is bad in the human animal, in all of us, and they don't shirk from showing it, don't pretend it isn't what drives us.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-07-19 00:00:00 Brennan Sekora Excellent - takes it to the edge and back .