Reviews for Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories

The average rating for Sam Lawson's Oldtown Fireside Stories based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-16 00:00:00 Koe Melk I love Lauren Groff. And I am trying to be better about reading other books authors I love have written, so I am currently making my way through her back catalogue and I am seriously happy about it. I think I liked this short story collection even more than her new one (which I reviewed earlier this year) and I enjoyed that one immensely. But this collection here just blew me away. I am in awe of Lauren Groff's command of language - every single sentence ist perfectly done while not making the writing sound clinical but rather organic and captivating. I also really like the way she structures her stories - they never felt like they were working towards a punchline but rather their endings were perfectly done. Some stories I would have loved to spend more time with but I mean that as a compliment. I do have the same problem with these short stories that I had with Groff's second collection: I am not too keen on her descriptions of overweight bodies; and the fixation on weight did not always work for me. I cannot quite put my finger on why I think she does this, but I do wish she stopped focussing on weight so much. But for me it never crossed the line into problematic territory and as such is not enough to ruin my enjoyment of these brilliant short stories. My favourite of the bunch is the last story "Delicate Edible Birds" - I loved it so much I considered giving the collection 5 stars because it ended on such a high note. Set during the Second World War (which I usually am not too keen on), this story is told from different perspectives of a group of journalists fleeing Paris on the eve of its occupation. It was harrowing and wonderful and absolutely beautifully written. Bern, the female main character, was so absolutely brilliant, I wish there was a whole book about her. You can find this review and other thoughts on books on my blog.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-30 00:00:00 Yvonne Pisani I love Lauren Groff's writing, her way with words. I'd say the writing in these stories is perhaps more exciting than the stories themselves. Not that the stories aren't riveting. Or some of them. They are all fairly long and focus principally on the dilemmas of women. She shows herself to be versatile in terms of setting and period - one story takes place in France in 1940, another during Spanish flu epidemic in the second decade of the 20th century and another in an unnamed country at an unnamed date where there's a dictatorship (the one dud in the collection for me). A criticism might be that her men aren't as richly imagined as her women. A solid 4+ stars.