#40.  Rosie Little’s Cautionary Tales For Girls.  By Danielle Wood.  Short Fiction.  3.5 Stars

I enjoyed this collection.  It’s a beautiful little book, the shape and feeling of some of the awesome McSweeney’s imprints, although not quite with the same detail as McSweeney’s.  I liked the idea behind this book, some stories are told first person, from the perspective of Rosie Little and others are told third person and are mostly women somehow connected to Rosie (although that is not always directly indicated, but rather just subtley implied).  Each story is separated by word chapters such as Virginity, Love, Trust, Beauty, etc.  I found most of the stories to be well written and at least somewhat powerful and I admit to crying a bit on the Love chapter, which tells me it was at least very powerful for me. 

Like I find in all collections, this collection a bit uneven with some truly powerful stuff and some ho-hum stuff.  Regardless I enjoyed every cautionary tale and liked that I felt transported to a slightly different/fantastical world than ours, though not too far that I felt lost.  My one real complaint, other than the previously mentioned uneven-ness is that each short piece has an excerpt wedged into the middle called “Notes From Rosie” and that basically acts as a little aside to something going on in the story.  These were sometimes lovely, but overall I found them distracting.  And when they weren’t brilliant, but just so-so inserts I found myself a bit annoyed.  I appreciate what Wood was going for and it was a unique and interesting idea, but for me it just wasn’t quite successful.