Ratings1
Average rating5
The short stories in Colleen O'Brien's All Roads can best be described as visceral. On more than one occasion, I physically cringed away from the page, and I mean that as a compliment: it's incredible that she brought to life these vivid characters and moments in such brief glimpses - some contained in just five pages. As a collection, it reminded me of Curtis Sittenfeld's ‘You Think It, I'll Say It'' - both piercingly observant and more than a little unsettling, or at least unsettled.
My favorites were ‘Charlie,' ‘Valentine's Day,' ‘The Deal', ‘The Cheesecake Factory,' and ‘Here For,' but truly, I appreciated nearly all. I found ‘All Roads' unpleasant, but in a provocative and compellingly hate-readable way. Similarly, I'll be going back to ‘The Fathers' because I have a sense there's something powerful there, but I'll admit that on first read I struggled to follow all the Michaels and their relationships to one another.
I'm thrilled to have gotten to know O'Brien as an author; hers is a collection that invites revisiting and warrants space on my increasingly crowded bookshelf. I'll be purchasing (and underlining, and rereading) a hard copy.
Thank you to Northwestern University Press for my ARC.