My first review of the year and its a book I was trying to finish last year but didn’t manage.
The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night
Jen Campbell
Spirits in jam jars, mini-apocalypses, animal hearts and side shows.
A girl runs a coffin hotel on a remote island.
A boy is worried his sister has two souls.
A couple are rewriting the history of the world.
And mermaids are on display at the local aquarium.
The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night is a collection of twelve haunting stories; modern fairy tales brimming with magic, outsiders and lost souls.
Bookshop.org | Goodreads | The StoryGraph | Amazon
It’s been a while since I’ve read a book of short stories, but every now and again I like to pick one up. I think with this book, it was the fairytale aspect that appealed to me.
There are a few stories that fit the category, but I was a bit disappointed as I wouldn’t class that many of them as fairy tales. There is an element of magic or fantasy to most of them, but it just doesn’t have the depth for me to class them as fairy tales.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the story ideas were so inventive and felt unique. They had the potential to be explored a little deeper, which would perhaps make them stronger, but just fell a little short because of the length of the story.
As with every short story collection, there were some that I liked and some that I didn’t, but I also felt like there were some that didn’t really have any aim. Even in a short story, there has to be something to work toward or an observation that becomes obvious, and that wasn’t always the case.
I also felt that the collection as a whole didn’t feel very cohesive, I think because I couldn’t find any sort of common theme that ran throughout. As I said, it has been a while since I’ve read a short story collection, but I feel like I should have felt some kind of relationship between the different stories or that they should stay with me in some way.
The stories that I did like from this book are Animals, Little Deaths, and Sea Devils. I could definitely feel a little spark from these tales. I did also like the story that the book takes its title from, but again it felt like a story onto itself and very different to the stories that surrounded it.
This book has some nice writing and some stories that I enjoyed, whilst I feel it didn’t quite live up to its potential in places and lacked unity, I imagine that others would enjoy it more.
everywhere-and-nowhere.com 