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Review: The Guy Not Taken: Stories

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beth — Tue, Sep 4 2007

Another book I picked up from the Recent Additions section of the library was Jennifer Weiner's The Guy Not Taken: Stories. Jennifer Weiner has written several novels, including Good in Bed and In Her Shoes. This is a collection of short stories written over the span of her career to date.

This is going to be a short review because I'm not feeling very creative today! Overall, I wasn't super impressed with this collection of stories. I know with short stories, it's harder to get to "know" the characters. But the stories felt very undeveloped to me; I had a hard time relating to the characters, and of course, just when you start to care a tiny bit, the story ends. The first few stories, which were written while Weiner was in college and are strongly tied to her real life, are the most interesting. The last story I found fairly repugnant. It's about an older, retired woman who gets "kidnapped" in her own home by two teenagers. I finished the story mostly just to get closure on the book, but if the last story had been a book itself, I wouldn't have even finished reading it. Jennifer Weiner writes stories about relationships, but the last one reads more like a thriller for the first two-thirds. It's not what you expect at the close of the rest of the stories, and left me with a bad taste in my mouth.

Most of the stories in this collection aren't bad, but they're not great either. This is one Jennifer Weiner book you can definitely skip without regret.
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