5 STARS for "The Source," " The Witness," and "The Old Order" - 2 stars for the rest with
really slow plots and no characters to connect with.

The book begins by displaying a stereotypical narrative of lazy and watermelon eating negroes,
then quickly advances to the opposite with the tales of Grandmother and Aunt Nannie.

Nannie originally was gifted to Grandmother as a slave, then emancipated.
Their friendship and sewing were a joy to read, as was Nannie's eventual freedom to live alone and happy. ( )

I first heard of Porter from the blurb of Flannery O'Connor's Everything That Rises and it turns out she was a huge influence on Carson McCullers and O'Connor (among others I'm sure). From this collection, I can certainly see why and how.

There is a true feeling of craft behind each story. Like every great artist, Porter makes it look effortless and natural on the surface but rest assured that she is fully in control of every word and every phrase.

What I admired the most is how she managed to capture the complexities of a person through their interactions and relationships. And there is definitely something to be said about her astuteness in correctly assessing the European atmosphere of the early 30s in the title story. Porter is essentially like a human camera with a real eye for reading the room/gauging a person/capturing the zeitgeist.

My favourite story overall was The Old Order, which is the best of the connected stories in the collection (with some outstanding standalone stories too). It did the most amazing thing of making the Grandmother this fully-realised person of contradictions with her own ideas whilst still remaining a product of her time.

As she writes with such details and insights on her characters, I look forward to reading her character-driven novel that I also got recently, Ship of Fools. ( )