Review: So-so
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 30, 2011
These short stories need a lot more work as to realism and characterization.Too many of the stories rely on the surprise or "twist" of the story serving as a substitute for drawing realistic characters and too many details just didn't ring true.  It didn't ring true that a group of Vietnam veterans would gather regularly in the manner described to relive events (it was also unclear to me how old they were supposed to be - half of them were dead and the rest were painted as elderly, but they were foot soldiers in Vietnam in the 1970s, making them around the age of my step-father - hardly old men.  Men in their 60s can usually sit still without having to fidget through arthritis pains).  The assassin characters in another story didn't ring true either and their unnecessarily convoluted scheme was obviously created by a fiction writer.The editing was very poor.  Here is a sample sentence from a story:  "Tyler finally knew freedom, his conciseness finally allowed to across the universe."  While the average reader can probably figure out what is meant by that sentence, why should we have to?  Reading shouldn't be a job of assembling a sentence from what we think the author might mean.The story with the most potential was the one with a dentist as a main character.  I was not surprised to see that the author is a dentist, given that the story was more grounded in realistic detail than any other.  Within writing what he knows, he was able to create a narrator more believable than any of his others and a story - while still leaving something to be desired in terms of characterization and plot - that was most satisfying to me as a reader.