Mom is Just a Nickname

Springtime on Mars, by Susan Woodring: A Book Review

I see every book I read as a journey. Each book explores some facet of a life, each allows me a glimpse into someone else’s head. I love reading short stories. It’s fascinating to me the way a writer can work so much into such a small number of words or pages. Previous collections that I’ve read were mostly anthologies, collected from many different authors and they’ve usually been in the fantasy genre. Springtime on Mars deviated from this.

The whole collection is written by Susan Woodring and each story is stamped with her voice. Her stories are not fantasy or sci-fi, as the title may suggest. Instead, they explore American life in the last fifty years or so, touching on a curiousity about the possibilities of the universe beyond Earth, which America’s space explorations have fuelled.

So, I began reading Springtime on Mars unsure of what to expect from the journey. In the end, it took me on a walk through lives that were at once mundane and amazing. Some were far removed from my experience of American life and others touched very close to my heart due to Susan Woodring’s deeply poignant storytelling.

I feel the need to go back and read it again, though. I was so busy searching for hidden layers and meanings in the first few stories that I wonder what I missed. I think, in this case, reading each story for itself, without an agenda of my own, will allow me to get closer to the heart of the stories in this book.

This book review has been brought to you by Blog Stop Book Tours. Please click through the link to see more information about this book and it’s author, including reviews from other bloggers.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under book. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.