First, the writing is quite good and I did enjoy the book.
That being said, this is a very long, dense collection of short stories, many of which are contemplative and intense. I read short stories like poetry, stopping at least for a moment after each one to process. I feel like I've been reading this book for years, and that near-weariness is not a good feeling, especially as an introduction to a new writer. I would have preferred a more winnowed selection. ( )

This is quite a collection of short stories, many with similar themes. They are closely observed and some of them are fascinating but many didn't quite hit the spot for me. The ones I did like were the shorter ones that were perfectly formed vignettes of a moment. An annual evening dinner with your daughter-in-law's family or a recurrence of cancer. These were just ten pages or so of outstanding writing. But the longer stories seemed to ramble or have similar themes and I found many of these hard going. ( )

I read this for a second time after Pearlman's death. I thought I might get more out of it, but many of the stories were still difficult for me to understand. Her word choice is excellent, and her choice of characters is interesting. "The Story" was my very favorite. I did feel as if I knew many of the characters in a variety of the stories. ( )

Edith Pearlman, a relatively obscure Brookline, MA author, just died a few weeks ago at age 86. The short stories in this collection are such perfectly observed, concise, humane gems that she can be comfortably compared to the renowned queen of the genre, Alice Munro. All 34 stories are told by women or girls, or by women when they were girls, encompassing inner layers and outer occurrences in perfect proportion, and some even conclude with pleasing surprises and stunning shocks. A little lost girl in Harvard Square; refugees and immigrants; the delivery of a Torah from a destroyed Czech village to a midwestern temple; shoplifting; affairs conducted and affairs resisted; deaths by disease; and, most remarkably, a suicide so vividly described that one might assume that the author had lived through it. Each story is so finely tuned that it's next to impossible to put this collection down until all have been read. My favorite is "Allog", about a Filipino newcomer who becomes indispensable to the wary residents of an Israeli apartment building. ( )

Oddly, I had forgotten that I had read stories by her before, but when I reread then here I remembered how much I had liked them. Lives up to the hype of the intro. She uses form amazingly well. ( )