KJ Hannah Greenberg

Oh my good god.

This was an Early Reviewer book, so I felt that I had to give it a decent go. If it wasn't for that, I'd have ditched it at the author's preface, one line of which read By using brief tales to vivisect marriage, family units, friendship, and passing fancies, we can: reify our ideas, celebrate the meaning we assign to our mentations, and explicate some of the responses we have to our notions' actualizations. (Seriously, publisher - what were you thinking?).

If I'd made it through that, page one of the first story would have once again made me hurl the book from me, as someone is trying to write a speech for a wedding and we hear "he meant to scribe that.... he penned that..." I thought it's sometime at school that you learn that you don't need to stretch desperately to find different words to describe the same simple action.

However, given the responsibility to review the book, I decided I had to get through 10% of it. This would have taken me to p24. I couldn't quite manage it. I did make it through to p22, the end of the fourth story in the book. What made me finally stop? It wasn't the fact that on a single page of this story, the main character was described as "the matron... the professor... the scholar... the intellectual". I could just about get through that by this point. No, it was the fact that at the end of the story I realised that I didn't have a clue what the point of the story was. Not that I understood it and was rolling my eyes because it was so irritating - as with the previous three stories. No, I just didn't get it at all.

If only it was possible to give a book a quarter star.… (mer)

So I don't have a lot of good to say about this book. It didn't invite me in as a reader, but it wasn't because it was challenging or thought-provoking.

The writing seemed pretentious. Greenberg uses an extensive vocabulary in a way that didn't really move things along, but seemed like more of a showing-off attempt. While that's problematic, the extensive typos make it unforgivable to me. I also didn't think the mention of hedgehogs in most of the stories in the collection made it quirky or funny since they often seemed so forced and there just for the sake of a gimmick. I just really, really did not enjoy this collection of short stories and I'm not sure who the audience would be for this.… (mer)

In her preface Ms. Greenberg provides a kind of mission statement
for her collection of short-shorts: “Small fictions, like the
eighty stories constituting The Immediacy of Emotional Kerfuffles
[commotions], make for great means to explore our
pathos, to unabashedly strip away old-fashioned prejudices, and
even to dally at the bizarre edges of living.” Her themes provide
the usual contemporary sources of pathos--loveless marriages,
midlife crises, failed careers and dreams, and terminal illnesses--
but her self-consciously literary narrative technique is indeed
bizarre and, in most cases, deprives her characters of the human
sympathy the reader would like to grant them.

Fantasy stories involve people, animals, or situations that
would not be encountered in real life but are told in a plausibly
realistic way. In contrast, Ms. Greenberg’s tales involve the
realistic stuff of everyday life told in a less than believable,
often incoherent manner. As nonsense it fails to be playful, and
as dry, subtle humor (if that is her intent) it fails to be amus-
ing. One of the worst offenders (brace yourself) was “Baking
Cookies, Counting Cheshire Cats, Espousing Classical Rhetoric,
Raising Rabbits, and Signing off from Cancer” about a dying woman
who has tried to juggle being an academic, housewife, and mother.
Unfortunately, Mr. Ears, the family’s sick rabbit who turned out
to be “preggers,” was the only one I could understand or feel
anything for.

In a few of her offerings, Ms. Greenberg allows us to put away
our unabridged dictionaries and enjoy a moving story told in a
plain, lucid style: “Earlop’s Secrets” and “The Milkmaid’s Prayer”
are examples. This is a collection to browse selectively.… (mer)