Review: Some gems, some flops
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 28, 2011
A collection of five widely varied short stories."Thank You For Calling"--A day in the life of a woman working for a call center during the Recession."The Event"--A dystopian future where once a year male teens and young adults go out and shoot the elderly."Fourth Degree Freedom"--A post nuclear war future where some children are born as different degrees of "monsters.""The Last Six Miles"--A woman gets over her divorce by becoming a runner."She Floats"--A woman wakes up in a tank with limited oxygen left and a man observing.Overall, this collection starts out average, strengthens, then crashes at the end.  I also believe Heily may have trouble finding an audience due to the variance from literary to dystopian and then to horror.  I would advise her to take the two strong dystopian stories and either make them into novels or write more scifi short stories and repackage them together.  Similarly, the literary fiction I believe would strongly appeal to many modern women during this current recession.  If she adds more literary stories to these two and packages it as a type of collection for the modern woman, she could have great success with them.  The last story must be re-done or trashed, however.  It sours the rest.Essentially, if any of the short stories above appeals to you, I would encourage you to get this book.  It is only 99cents, and a good short story is definitely worth that.