by Deb Olin Unferth
Minor Robberies (2007)
* * * * (Great) Realistic
Two sisters on vacation bicker like sisters do until they night leave a movie theater and are mugged at knifepoint.
There is a definite rhythm and flow to the sentences in this short tale. The arguing and fighting and general “sisterliness” presented in the story is wonderfully captured in some amazing sentences.
“It [a movie] was an adventure, or sci-fi feature, or men with guns, done in digits, digitized, with a neatly typed sentence below explaining to everybody in one language as the people on the screen explained, or tried to, in another. The two sisters sat in front of the giant screen. They didn’t argue or see each other but it wasn’t quite the moment of sisterliness the sisters had hoped for.”The only problem is that the story stretches a bit thin, is a little too long. Even wonderful sentences cannot mask the few unnecessary bits that push the story just past its welcome. The old maxim “a little goes a long way” is apt.
No comments:
Post a Comment