Trying to Smile: And Other Stories - Hardcover

Lewis, Sara

3.71

31 ratings by Goodreads

9780151913121: Trying to Smile: And Other Stories

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151913129 ISBN 13: 9780151913121

Publisher: Harcourt, 1992

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Lewis’s premier collection of short stories reveals the quietly extraordinary in the lives of the ordinary-actresses who wait tables, expectant parents, jittery fianc�s. These nine subtly interrelated tales create a familiar world of unlikely heroes, a microcosm of contemporary american life.

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About the Author:

Sara Lewis has been publishing fiction and non-fiction for over 20 years. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Redbook, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, Mademoiselle and the Mississippi Review. Her essays and nonfiction have appeared in Ladies' Home Journal, McCall's, FamilyFun, Child and on National Public Radio. Sara lives in San Diego with her husband and two children.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Nine short stories mostly about young women slightly too outr‚ to be yuppies, going through troubled times but keeping stiff upper lips about it. Many of Lewis's offerings first aired in the pages of magazines like Seventeen and Mademoiselle. The best of the lot comes first and is called ``Gone.'' Set around 1970 and bright with the humor/pathos of domestic event, it chronicles the death of an insistently square and rigid father (he voted for Nixon twice) from the point of view of his eldest daughter. At the graveside a colleague of the dear departed reveals his other life: ``We loved a wonderful man,'' she tells the grieving widow, leaving the young narrator far more shattered by her father's rejection than by his death. In other entries, problems exist--like a baby soon to be born in a financially strapped household or an adolescent boy thrown off course by the death of an old friend--but things just fall into place (without much plot tinkering by the author). Still, Lewis hasn't perfected the art of finding a story's end, leaving ``Perfect Combinations,'' concerning the out-of-sync love affair between a struggling actress and rock-music roadie, dangling, with no resolution, either poetic or actual. Lewis's candor and craftsmanship are to her credit--but there's something about the combination of the Spartan prose and quotidian subject matter that underwhelms. -- Copyright �1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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