by Neil Gaiman
Fragile Things (2006)
* * * * * (Excellent) Supernatural
The narrator recalls the moment he met the ghost of a gypsy woman one night when he was 15 and on his way to a friend’s home.
I’m intrigued with the idea of preferring to share only “story-shaped” tales. These would be stories with clear beginnings, middles, and ends. Everything explained and neatly in place. I tend to prefer this type of tale, myself. That’s not to say I don’t occasionally mind when a story is just a rambling mess of amazing sentences. I’m sucker for interesting sentences, such as this:
“She was not my girlfriend (my girlfriend lived in Croydon, where I went to school, a gray-eyed blonde of unimaginable beauty who was, as she often complained to me, puzzled, never able to figure out why she was going out with me), but she was a friend, and she lived about a ten-minute walk away from me, beyond the fields, in the older part of town.”But, the more “story-shaped” a tale, the more enjoyment I find, even if the tale is short, simple, and true thing with questions left unanswered and possibly not all that entertaining in the retelling to begin with.
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