She Treads Softly: Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles

Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles by Anne Tyler
Penguin Random House: 5/29/18
eBook review copy; 24 pages
ISBN-13: 9780525565079

Half-Truths and Semi-Miracles by Anne Tyler is a very highly recommended re-released short story about a faith healer.
Susanna is an ordinary woman whose gift to heal people by touching them is discovered when she was seventeen. As word of her God-given power to heal spreads, the gift her touch seems to bestow on some people also becomes a burden she has to bear. This is a wonderful short story!

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Penguin Random House via Netgalley.

No comments:

Post a Comment

John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.