Curl up and enter the eclectic world of S. R. Mallery, where sad meets bizarre and deception meets humor; where history meets revenge and magic meets gothic. Whether it’s 500 words or 5,000, these TALES TO COUNT ON, which include a battered women’s shelter, childhood memories, Venetian love, magic photographs, PTDS fallout, sisters’ tricks, WWII spies, the French Revolution, evil vaudevillians, … vaudevillians, and celebrity woes, will remind you that in the end, nothing is ever what it seems.
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Inspiration often is the result of cross pollination between different domains of art. The work of Sarah Mallery are a result of her skills in quite of them: she has been a classical/pop singer/composer, and moved on to the professional world of production art and calligraphy, led a long career as an award winning quilt artist/teacher and an ESL/Reading instructor. all of which enrich her literary work. Her short stories have been published in descant 2008, Snowy Egret, Transcendent Visions, The Storyteller, and Down In the Dirt. In this book, she presents a selection of them.
First let me say how much I love the title, which offers a dual meaning to me: First, you can have confidence in the work of S. R. Mallery. And second, the selection of stories here is based on an ascending word count. I have always believed that a story should have as many words as it takes to tell it. There is never a story ‘too short’ or ‘too long’ if it’s woven with skill. In fact, engaging the reader with flash fiction is a great art, similar to capturing the imagination with the essential strokes of a picture.
The word count connection allows you to pick a story for the amount of time you have to spend with it, yet it also offers the element of surprise. You never know where it’s going to take you—into a battered women’s shelter, back to childhood memories, the intrigue of WWII spies, into the pages of history with the French Revolution.
Delve in and expect the unexpected!
Five stars.
What a great collection of short stories! What I liked most of all was that each and every one of them was so different, and all of them ended in a way that I would never expect! I love stories with meaning, and each of these stories certainly carries an important message for the reader, some telling about paradoxes and twists of fate, like in the story with a tenant, who didn’t want his old building renovated; some stories showing something that doesn’t seem what it is, like in the story with the twin sisters or a girl and her ex-boyfriend and why he acted the way he did.
I really appreciated how historical fiction was masterfully interwoven with the present time tales, which will certainly make this collection even more appealing to a wide audience of readers. The writing is sharp and clever, and the characters are complex and very well-developed, despite the fact that normally character development is very hard to show in a short story just because of its length, but Ms. Mallery met the task admirably. Beautiful work!
I am new to books written by this talented writer, and expected a normal story from start to finish. But nothing was normal or ordinary about this collection of short stories. Cleverly written each story engrossed me and I wanted more. From modern day to the French Revolution Ms. Mallery captured the time, the feel, from love and loss, to angst and revenge, every emotion perfectly revealed and dragging the reader with them.
Starting with short, enticing, heart-pounding stories, the word count grew, as did the depth and passion and hunger to learn more from each of the nineteen stories. It is obvious that the writer is very much in touch with the vast array of human emotions throughout every generation, and she displays her love of history, her great writing skills and vivid imagination. I couldn’t pick one as I loved them all.
Congratulations, Susan Mallery–outstanding work.
This was such a fun, interesting read. This is the first book I have read by S.R. Mallery, but there was such a variety that I couldn’t help but love them. Some have twisted endings, some have serious endings, some leave you sitting there with your jaw hanging. I cannot wait to read more from this author, and soon!
If you like short stories, this is for you. A great collection of shorts, with interesting twists. I listened to this book on audio and I was particularly impressed by the narrator. This series of stories can be read and enjoyed by anyone.