Review: Uh
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2013
The sad thing about story collections, even when there are only two stories, is that the quality of the stories is  rarely the same. In this case I'm not sure I should even use the word quality.If it weren't for the cat characters in story there could be no rationale for presenting the stories together.I hate being harsh, but I've read many, many stories of this quality or better: when my middle school students had done well on a portfolio assignment. The best of them were hung on the walls our quad shared.I doubt that all States require writing portfolios yet. Our state constantly changed the requirements, and now that I'm retired, who knows what they've done with it. The last year I taught portfolios were required in 5th, 8th, and 11th grades, but our system wrote them every year. If a student wrote a piece in 6th grade he really liked he could improve upon it as he learned more.Different styles of writing were required. I saw the middle school portfolio, so I remember my students doing a piece of creative writing, a piece from another subject ( one of the best I saw was an environmental essay . The subject was science), something that really happened to them ( I read a piece from a young lady who had been raped. That didn't go on the wall, but it did go in her portfolio. She asked me to read it. Later I read a piece from a student defending her right to commit suicide. That stayed off the wall; she went into therapy. Therapy helped a lot.)Maybe I place these short stories on a par with my middle schoolers because they were such experienced writers-whether they wanted to be or not. They also kept journals and answered questions in every subject in paragraph form. Not every question, of course, but specific questions we had chosen to see if they understood how to solve, or how to share knowledge.This author has also given us a teaser, a piece of another story offered in another short story collection. Truthfully, the teaser is better than the other two short stories put together. I don't think I'll give up on Kater Cheek yet.