While a couple of the stories had been good, the more I read the more I became frustrated with the stop-start feeling of reading short stories. I thought I would persevere nonetheless; I’d read 5 out of the 10 stories and could have easily interspersed the remaining 5 over a few days while predominately reading something else. But then I started reading story 6: Arcadia, nothing caught my attention, I couldn’t differentiate between the characters, I had no attachment to them or the story, and it’s the longest story in the collection. I very quickly (3 pages) realised that this was not the story for me, and I could feel my frustrations growing. I wasn’t even really reading it, I was skimming and even that wasn’t getting it over with quick enough. 

January is, historically, a month of reading slumps so I was soo happy to be so engaged and enthusiastic with my first read of the year; The Morning Gift by Eva Ibbotson, I could clearly see this undoing all that of that enthusiasm. 

I still believe that Emma Cline is a talented writer, I really enjoyed The Girls and will be interested to see what novels she releases next. My DNFing is more down to the realisation that short stories don’t tend to be an enjoyable experience for me.