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briandice's review
4.0
Caketrain is quickly becoming one of my favorite independent publishers. In 2011 they released this wonderful collection of ten short works of fiction by author Sara Levine - stories with emotional depth and dark comedic moments. I especially appreciated Levine's deft hand in writing dialogue - those scenes are written with a fine distillation that includes everything that needs to be said, nothing more.
"Baby Love" was my favorite of the group - after finishing the collection I researched the author and read that this particular story resonated with her the most. You can see that in the writing. Any parent that has watched a child grow up quickly, too fast, will relate to the beautiful final paragraph of the story.
Levine has convinced me that she is something special and to be read further. I've purchased her novel "Treasure Island!!!" for further investigation.
Recommended.
kiramke's review
5.0
Smart and dark and original and so funny and somewhat elliptical at times... my kind of collection. Glad I bought it. Caketrain should just set up a subscription service.
jasonfurman's review
4.0
A selection of short stories, mostly dark in a humorous vein, often about the different perceptions that men and women have of situations and relationships. The title story “Short Dark Oracles” was probably the best but I enjoyed most of them, finding them both amusing and insightful. But not nearly as good as Sara Levine’s excellent novel Treasure Island!!!.
shimmer's review
5.0
This is a powerful set of stories coming at questions of self-invention in a number of ways. In one story it's an unflattering past haircut (and the mother responsible for it) by which a character defines herself, clinging perhaps self-indulgently to that ugly identity even when it is upstaged by the ability of those around her to rise above their own damaged bodies. In others characters know themselves by the presence, absence, and discomfort of their own children, or (in the title story) by the apocryphal stories they invent for and project onto other people as an escape from their own anxious lives, without regard for the consequences and potential damage of those projections. In probably my favorite story, "Baby Love" (which, full disclosure, I had the privilege of editing and publishing), this social dimension allows Levine to give us not only the tight domestic sphere of a couple whose lives are changed by a baby, but gives us that couple in a nest of cultural assumptions about parenthood, class, and identity with that baby as the center. Overall, I was impressed by the way these characters and their flexible lives aren't insular but social, giving the stories a sense of consequence and complication rather than treating identity as something that can be crafted in isolation without impacting others and as if characters live in a box apart from the world—a dimension that, for me, is too often absent in this style of tightly-focused, slightly surreal urban fiction, so makes these stories stand out.
tspangler1970's review
4.0
Crazy good short stories that made me think of a more approachable and funnier Lydia Davis, by my new Facebook friend and fellow NU alum Sara Levine. Can't wait to check out her upcoming novel! :)
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