Shelly Chen Chen itibaren Fraserganj, West Bengal 743339, India itibaren Fraserganj, West Bengal 743339, India

Man, I don't know. I love Neil Gaiman, but this collection started to get tiresome after about 200 airy pages. A story like "October in the Chair" is so enchanting and unique that I can't help but recommend it, but most of the pieces in Fragile Things were little more than fun experiments. In fact, that's exactly what this collection feels like: fun, throw-away experiments from a slightly-too-prolific author. Compare this collection to, say, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me; they just don't measure up to the depth and craftsmanship of those also-fabulist tales. Too often, the hook is simply that something weird happened, and we read the stories in this collection to find out what happened, but there are very little stakes for that happening, no emotional transformation. Compare "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" with anything by Stuart Dybek (who often uses somewhat fantastical tropes to explore adolescents discovering the alienness of their maturity), and the Gaiman story falls so flat. Authenticity of character, transformation, theme--these things are missing from many of these stories, I'm sorry to say. And in their place are stock characters and situations: silent, stoic heroes; villains who walk into a room and name the title of the painting the hero was looking at; dream sequences that tie everything together. It's sometimes fun, but ultimately not that good.