Valerie Miner

The good: Miner is very good at creating moments of dramatic tension, particularly a sense of impending, unseen threat. She also writes very, very poignantly about grief and loss, and the sadness of unmet expectations. There are some very creepy and very moving passages in many of the collection’s stories.

Her characters have warts and failings: unrealistic expectations of themselves, each other, society. A willingness to look the other way on addiction and domestic abuse until it’s too late. An inability to enjoy life’s pleasures without feeling anxious they’ll be taken away. Impatience with friends and loved ones. Prickliness. Inconsistent viewpoints. And so on.

The neutral: Miner's stories revisit the same core elements in different trappings. There’s nothing wrong with this; plenty of authors have That Thing that drives them to write. But it’s more noticeable in a collection of Miner’s work that it would be as the stories were first published--singly, in literary magazines alongside other authors' works. Almost all of Miner’s stories feature one or more of the following: children from a previous marriage to a dead or divorced spouse; a new same-sex partner, someone with cancer; an ominous or disappointing male relative or ex-partner; people traveling to bring closure or find a new beginning.

The bad: For a short story writer, Miner can be weirdly inattentive to detail. She bungles a routine exchange at a post office; a character doesn’t know basic facts about the institution that employs her. Dialogue is often an afterthought. A character refers to her friend in the third person—while in conversation with that friend—to facilitate exposition Miner wants to deliver. An eleven-year-old speaks in Miner’s adult voice to accomplish the same. A character "snaps a photo with her android,” even though no one thinks of their phone that way, and it’s the sort of simple misstep that jars readers out of the story’s flow.

There’s a lot to like in these stories, particularly if one doesn’t read them all in the space of a few weeks. Had the execution been fine-tuned they would have been even better.… (meer)

I'm not an avid reader of short stories, but the pandemic has shortened my focus and energy. While I chose Miner's latest collection for story length, it's her characters and quiet attention to detail that kept me reading. Miner proves you don't need page count to tell a story with complexity and intimacy. As a reader, you immediately feel like you've dropped in on a conversation between friends. Instead of a surprising plot twist, there is comfort in knowing what happens next. Often there is tension or conflict between characters, but it isn't aggressive. Rather, these moments remind us what makes us each different, and how much we really have in common.… (meer)