The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank

A very promising title and a cute cover made me snatch this book up and begin reading it immediately. Oh, they do print the word Îfiction' on the cover so you know it isn't really about hunting and fishing, should mention that. And it all started well, an interesting story about a girl meeting her brother's girlfriend and how uncomfy all of that is. Then another chapter about the same girl, who isn't fourteen anymore but now is having a complicated vacation with her boyfriend that involves staying at his ex-girlfriend's place, hmmm. So I suspected a sort of layering going here, about the theme of relationships in general, right?

The next chapter made me feel as though I'd been asleep through the first two, because I suddenly found myself flipping back and forth wondering who on earth everyone was, had the fourteen year old just become a granny in her fifties or was I completely flaking out? Okay, so now that I've finished the whole thing let's just say that this is more a collection of short stories than a novel, and three of them link a tiny bit, while two of them are entirely unrelated, and the whole experience is kind of worrisome and not as experimental as it perhaps imagines. In fact, where I had been hoping for some sophisticated layering, the stories got progressively lighter and less deep. I would have been happier if she'd stayed with any of these stories and finished her five novels - they all feel like introductions. As it is, I felt cheated. Maybe some of the Bridget Jones-que marketing is to blame as well. [JL]

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