Let's Dance by Lucy Sweeney Byrne: short story collection review
Overview: This collection of short stories is described on the back of the book as being about, "women on the brink," and that summarizes the uniting theme pretty well. While the majority of the stories will appeal to fans of Rooney or Naoise Dolan showing women grappling with the realities of modern life, there are also stories that play with the absurd, taking challenges women face and using magical or otherwise other-worldly elements to make a larger point. While I preferred the stories the hued closer to real life, there's interesting ingenuity throughout this collection. Overall: 4
The stories vary in length quite a bit, which I did enjoy. I generally found the flash length pieces more successful in providing a satisfying slice of life that built an effective story with economy. The central story the collection is named after is referred to as a "novella" on the back of the book. I'm not sure if that's what I'd consider it, but it does take up seventy of the total one hundred and eighty-nine pages. While the story did have its lulls, I liked how we learned so much about the character's life through her mental tangents over the course of a party she doesn't really want to be at.
"Echolocations" was by far my favorite story in the book. It's nearly a frame story that begins with a thirty-four year-old woman who now lives in the suburbs but is back in Dublin for a day. In a gap in her plans, she goes to a lunchtime thirty minute movie showing. As she watches this experimental film, her mind wanders to everything that Dublin used to and still does symbolize. She struggles to square the passage of time and her new life with the one she used to live. I found this to be extremely effective.
On the whole, I liked Byrne's writing quite a bit. She's good at locating specific feelings and realities of being alive that are both mundane and profound, and I found myself highlighting many lines and passages while I read. The more experimental stories that were moved out of the present day were more of a struggle for me. I found myself skim reading this handful of stories as they almost felt out of place in the collection. But that's the beauty of short story collections. You're able to entirely take what you want from them, leaving behind what doesn't resonate.
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