What a writer Flannery O'Connor was - this collection of short stories shows it very clearly. The characters seem to come to life after a few pages, the settings are uncomfortably real, the plots somewhere between conceivable and realistic.

After a few stories, however, they started to feel like "more of the same" to me: The settings are just too similar to tell them apart meaningfully, the characters - albeit awfully real - seem to come from the same stock, the plots often seem to meander towards some gruesome death. I felt a certain hopelessness in the plots, and couldn't really connect to any of the characters well enough to carry me through the stories.

My edition contained a 60-page foreword by a friend of the author's (who edited and published her work after her death). While it was dreadfully long and very literary minded, it did help me put some things into perspective.

While my reading experience doesn't really let me give more than two stars, I am sure some others will love the stories in this collection - they are well-written after all.