Review: I Want to Show You More

I Want to Show You More by Jamie Quatro
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I consider myself a fairly harsh critic of short stories, because so often they conclude and leave me feeling disoriented or dissatisfied. In this collection, Quatro delivers 15 short stories that are not only complete within themselves, but they do what only the best short story collections can do: they demonstrate that they belong together. Some characters recur, but so do some themes and some key symbolic elements, all transformed and yet recognizable as fragile ties that link back to prior stories or wind forward into later ones. In this way, I'm glad I read the collection in order, because only when I was a few stories in did I start to recognize the ways in which they were all linked. A mother, a lover, running, survival, dependency, independence . . . these are just some elements Quatro renders with the searing truth and emotional vividness that can only be achieved by the best sort of short story collection.

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