Girl Meets Boy by Kelly Milner Halls (editor)
| Girl Meets Boy by Edited by Kelly Milner Halls | |
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| Category: Teens | |
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Reviewer: Robert James
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| Summary: Interesting short story collection with some excellent works, as pairs of authors team up to write the same story from two points of view. Well worth checking out. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 304 | Date: March 2012 |
| Publisher: Chronicle | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9781452102641 | |
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Have you ever been in a relationship where you couldn’t understand what the other person was thinking? Perhaps that’s a dumb question… have you ever been in a relationship where you COULD understand what the other person was thinking? In a unique collection, twelve authors team up to write eleven stories telling things the same tales from both the boy's point of view and the girl's. It consists of five pairs of stories, each looking at the same events from a different angle, and a final collaboration which switches back and forth between the two viewpoints throughout the story.
While this could have felt needlessly gimmicky, for the most part it's a well-executed collection based around a really interesting idea. There's nothing here I disliked - a couple of stories are on the thin side and I probably wouldn't bother rereading them, but everything is at least worth checking out once. At the top end of the scale, there's a couple of absolute gems in here. James Howe's Want To Meet, about a gay boy hoping to fall in love, and the response piece Meeting For Real by Ellen Wittlinger about a girl who is trying to help him are both marvellous, while Rita Williams-Garcia and Terry Trueman's pieces about a white boy and the African-American girl he has a crush on are just wonderful - incredibly sweet and charmingly written. The final story, written by Sara Ryan and Randy Powell, packs a powerful punch in its short length, with a great twist. It's also an incredibly diverse collection, featuring characters of different races, sexualities and religions, and stories ranging from the lovely all the way through to the twisted, with the theme of love uniting them all.
I quite often treat short story collections as samplers, using them to take a look at which author’s writing styles I’d like to read more of, and this works excellently on that level. There are at least half a dozen here whose future work I’ll be keeping a close eye on, but they’ve all provided stories here that were satisfying reads in their own right.
Overall a strong recommendation as one of the best short story collections I’ve read in a fair while. I’d love to see a sequel with some new authors tackling the same idea!
For another great collection of short stories for teens, the paranormal collection Kiss Me Deadly by Tricia Telep (Editor) features some of the biggest names in young adult fiction today and is a massive recommendation, particularly for the stories by Sarah Rees Brennan, Diana Peterfreund and Maggie Stiefvater.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Girl Meets Boy by Kelly Milner Halls (editor) at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
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