Frankly, the first two short stories in this collection, “Happily Ever After” and “Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain,” nearly prompted me to put the book down and walk away. There were some quirks in the writing that irked me and the stories seemed a little aimless. I also did not care much for “Boys Go to Jupiter,” because I thought the premise was somewhat exaggerated, although maybe that was the aim. In the latter story, a white female college student becomes the target of her college’s libertarian group because a picture of her in a Confederate flag bikini given to her by the guy she was seeing on vacation was posted by him on the Internet and it went viral.

“Why Won’t Women Just Say What They Want” is a strange tale about an artist who treated the women in his life terribly and later goes about apologizing to each of them in a big way. But every story after that improved for me, and I especially loved the story “Alcatraz” and the novella at the that gave the book its name, “The Office of Historical Corrections.” The latter is about a historian, Cassie, who leaves her tenure-track professorship to work for a new (fictional, a little creepy, but certainly plausible) federal government departing, the Institute for Public History, jokingly referred to as the Office of Historical Corrections. The people who work for the Institute are charged with leaving notes that clarify inaccurate historical facts on display throughout the country, from souvenirs to commemorative plaques.

The threads running these stories are atonement, loss, and race, and they are often told with subtlety and wry humor. I would have given five stars if the first few stories had not caused me some difficulty, but the novella itself would have earned five stars, as well as some of the other stories. ( )

Stellar stories. ( )

This was really incredible. The stories were physically painful. 10/10 recommend. ( )

Not my kind of fiction. Some of it was good, but some was didactic and some sentences were show-offy in a way that distracted from the story. Of course, she’s 100 times a better writer then I could ever be, so I hate to criticize. I guess I should just stick with “not my kind of fiction.” ( )

Not at all what I was expecting, but excellent. ( )