I’ve told you about this author before. She was in my favorite books of 2006 and you’ll find brief reviews of her two previous collections if you search for “crane” on this page.

This collection shares some qualities with the previous two (her writing is still “breathless” and “exhilarating” as I mentioned there). Some of the stories still feel like they take an experience and just pinpoint EXACTLY how it feels: as if she reached right into your life and wrote down for everyone what you were thinking but couldn’t put into words.

But I think there’s an evolution here as well (and I mean that in a good way). They’re less in a girls’ world (or one girl’s world in the case of the second collection) but more “a girl out in the world” if you know what I’m sayin. There’s some spot-on societal criticism (the reality show digs are priceless!). There’s a bit more fantastical-ness than there was before (I’m thinking of “Manny” and “Blue Girl”, they feel imaginative in a different way). There’s a letter that is, indeed, all the best things you would want to say to an yet to be born and/or adopted child. And there are relationshps that, while being just as insightful as in her previous collections, have some sense of growth, some sense of “who you are, even while in a relationship, that is not defined by that relationship” in a way I didn’t notice before.

When you’re reading someone who’s published 30 novels and been well chronicled and gone through their different paths to the road they’re on, it’s a different feeling. You know “oh now I’m reading from THIS time in her writing” or “oh yes this is when she tried out THIS”. It’s not quite as revelatory as when you’re reading someone who’s early on in their writing career, still somehow fresh and new, and you start thinking “hey, wait this feels….different. this feels….further on.” Years from now, I think I’ll look back and say “oh yes, the third book. That was a different place. A new path.” Or, an evolution. For this reader, anyway.
I particularly LOVED “Donovan’s Closet.” And “Blue Girl.” And “Promise” just leaves me completely heartbroken with the beauty of it.

But again, in the good way.