Brother Frank's Gospel Hour: Stories

Brother Frank's Gospel Hour doesn't approach the level of Dance Me Outside and The Moccassin Telegraph, but Kinsella remains a storyteller nonetheless. The stories in Brother are more fantastic (one story could almost be considered a "ghost story", and another is loosely based on a Japanese fable) and feel less "real" than the earlier Hobbema reserve stories. And where the earlier stories often had a surprising twist and showed some surprising sides of the protagonists, these stories are more predictable. Conflicting Statements, especially, reads almost like a college student's writing experiment. (Mind, I would still have given it an "A".) It's almost as if Silas Ermineskin himself has matured as a writer, but at the cost of his originality. Kinsella does hit the nail on the head once or twice, though, as Silas remarks: "Stories aren't about events, they're about the people they happen to." Kinsella does remain true to that adage.

If you don't laugh out loud at least once in each of these stories, there's something wrong with you. Deeply felt and very wise, these stories still manage to be sidesplittingly funny. Kinsella is possessed of a unique and very readable style, and fills his work to bursting with amazing people and amazing adventures. He's a true original.