Rate this book

Wild Child And Other Stories (2010)

by T.C. Boyle(Favorite Author)

3.69 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0670021423 (ISBN13: 9780670021420)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Viking Adult

review 1: Confident but facile writing. Boyle comes up with one perfect sentence after another, each anchored with a clever simile, or well-oiled line of dialog, or dazzling verb, or sometimes all three. Whether any of these well-crafted sentences fit the needs of the story or not seems beside the point. The first-person stories all sound like exactly the same voice: cynical, unpleasantly selfish, and ridiculously perceptive of tiny details. It's completely the same voice, no matter who the narrative character is. The stories themselves left an unpleasant residue in my mind. The exception to all of the above is the first story of the collection, Balto, which captured a believable perspective of a young girl being raised by an alcoholic father.
review 2: This collection o... moref stories deftly tackles the main literary conflicts in such a brilliant way (man v man, society, self, and nature). Boyle's style is always on the mark and oftentimes deadpan funny. Though I wasn't happy with how some of the individual stories ended, the final story, Wild Child, nearly took my breath away in how it surprisingly pulled the entire collection together. If I were still teaching HS English, I would want to assign this, though there are some sex scenes that might not make that possible. As a HS student, I felt like I was forced to read too much stuff that was just plain awful, and if I didn't already love reading, school would have killed it for me. less

Download links for: Wild Child and Other Stories

Advertising