Somewhere in California there is a divorced woman suffering from a deadly but vaguely-defined illness, lying in her hospital bed, looking out the window, and thinking about earthquakes, comparing herself to her suicidal mother, and wondering whether her neighbor’s golden lab is rooting around in her garden.

That’s a reasonably good aggregate description of pretty well every Amy Hempel story, as far as I can tell. I’m of course being flippant, but there are some pretty strong themes that come across here. As much as Hempel’s writing is beautiful and lyrical, she does have certain inspirational wells that she returns to rather more than I’d like.

I probably read this collection the wrong way, which is to say, all at once and cover-to-cover. It became quite a slog, and more than a few times I found myself flipping to the end and wondering how I’d ever get there. A better way to read this collection is, as a friend of mine has done, to buy the book, pick it up now and again, sample a story or two, and then put it down.

The voice is very fresh and it is wonderful to savor and appreciate, provided you give yourself the time to do so. There is a dose of magical realism here and there, a dose of the supernatural, which I enjoyed even though it was a little bit of a surprise that took some getting used to. There is also a nice attempt to mediate the tendency towards melancholy that seems to be all the rage in short stories these days, and there are some genuinely happy stories as well.