The Love of a Good Woman : Stories

I loved this book. It really makes you think about the underlying motives and loyalties that exist in people. Alice Munro examines the everyday sort of person who must make certain choices and live with it. In reading this book I found myself asking questions and feeling slightly disturbed by my lack of certainty on many issues this book addresses. I love the way she uses language and her use of detail is superb. It will make you think and wonder and imagine all at the same time. What a wonderful writer she is!

Alice Munro is able to convey in twenty pages more character and depth than many people understand about themselves or their loved ones in a lifetime. She allows us to embrace our flaws and accept them with grace and understanding. She is an amazing writer and a voice of humanity to be admired.

I have been reading Munro's stories for years and even the profound admiration I had for her work could not prepare me for the force of this collection. It is literally impossible to find a better book. Each one of Munro's stories is worth hundreds of lesser works. The prose is gorgeous, the vision expansive yet percise and humane. Read, "Save the Reaper" last. It is a reworking of American fable and Flannery O'Connor that shows Munro has surpassed even that great American writer.

In the title story of this collection, Enid, the self-sacrificing practical nurse, is transformed into someone else after she has the sickly and evil Mrs. Quinn as a patient before Mrs. Quinn dies. Without warning, Mrs. Quinn confesses conspiring with her husband to conceal a murder.Up to then, Enid thought of Rupert Quinn as a good man and devoted husband. Does "the love of a good woman" have the power of redemption:? Read the story to get Alice Munro's always astonishing perspective on the subject of goodness.In another fine story from this collection, "Before the Change", a young woman uses an abortion to test her father and her lover and they both come up short.In "Jakarta", my personal favorite, Sonje is such a good woman that she takes on the care of her lover's blind mother while Cottar continues a traveling, leftist journalist. But Sonje is not a fool though she may be a saint as her old friend Kent discovers.The collection contains such thought-provoking studies that it could influence the way you live your life.