Saturday Review: “Reflection Against the Darkness” a review by Barbara Bennett in NCLR Online Spring 2024 of Jill McCorkle’s collection Old Crimes and Other Stories (2024)
Bennett begins her review by identifying an inherent oddity of McCorkle’s latest short story collection: it is much less concerned with the whimsy and love of the world than it is with the regret and fear of it. As Bennett has written scholarly critiques about and reviewed McCorkle’s work for NCLR (and others), this acknowledgement of change is valid for both the writer and the written. Bennett writes, “McCorkle is in her sixties now, and her perspective has grown more serious, sadder even.”
“McCorkle’s characters struggle throughout these stories to find some sense of peace. Their creator is a master of the short story, and in these stories, she shows us people, mainly women, who feel “trapped, desperate” (114).” Bennett touches on many of the darker aspects of the stories but then ends the review saying, “In our troubled times, perhaps we are all like McCorkle’s characters: we just want a place to feel peace and love. This is not the amusing and quirky McCorkle of the past, but perhaps it is a truer one.”
Read the entire review in the Online Spring 2024 issue out now! And order the book from Bookshop.org.
