Review: Not as polished as I'd like, but a warm collection.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 03 31, 2014
This review is written by Nic's wife.This collection is the best thing I've read by Dodd, mainly because the stories are heartfelt. Not all of the concepts behind them are especially unique, but there is a lot more passion in in them.I still have substantial pet peeves with her writing, in particular her sentence construction. A lot of times, her structure veers into dangling participles, passive voice, or weirdness, and it jerks me out of the story.  While I read her writing, I reverse the order of clauses frequently, to make the sentences flow better and read faster. I wish Dodd's writing was warmer, to match most of the stories she wants to tell. There's some more action-filled moments in some of them, where her writing shines through more, and it emphasizes her concepts nicely.I do have to commend Dodd for her variety of characters in here. I've seen a few collections lately where the characters are always basically the same, and only the setup or situation changes. There were a few stories in the middle that didn't sit well to me, because it seemed like they hinged entirely on sexual mores that I, personally, don't hold or care for. That meant that large swaths of those characterizations just left me cold. Natasha Newton's story was one of those, and If You Ever Come Back (I think) was the other. And the story about the slave girl being transported didn't feel fully researched or realistic, given the subject matter.At any rate, there's some rough spots, and Dodd's writing is still comparatively unpolished, but it's a warm collection.