This is a collection of short stories that Jennifer has written over the years - some as long ago as when she was in college and some were written or re-written just for this book. A few have been previously published, but only in magazines where Jennifer's fans were unlikely to have seen them.
There is no overriding theme in the stories, except perhaps of women (and a few men) discovering themselves and/or discovering love. Interestingly, the stories were deliberately ordered in the book by the ages of the protagonists: starting with three stories featuring the young Josie and her family, who are dealing with the sudden departure of their father - and concluding with Dora on the Beach, about a retiree living on Atlantic Beach who is "held hostage" by two teenage girls on vacation.
One of the best stories in this book is the titular "The Guy Not Taken", about a slightly unhappy married woman with a baby who gets an unexpected (and fantastical) opportunity to see what her life would have been like if she had stayed with her former boyfriend. How many of us actually get a chance to see if life is greener on the other side of the fence? (As an aside, this story has been optioned to be a movie.)
Overall, the quality of the stories in the collection is high. The reader gets a sense of the character of the people in the stories, which is unusual and frequently difficult for an author to accomplish in the limited pages of a short story. I guess that speaks highly of Weiner's characterization ability. Of course, if you are a big Weiner fan and are used to the fully developed plots and characterizations of her novels, you might be slightly disappointed. As for me, I found almost all of these stories to be delightlful "slices of life".
There is no overriding theme in the stories, except perhaps of women (and a few men) discovering themselves and/or discovering love. Interestingly, the stories were deliberately ordered in the book by the ages of the protagonists: starting with three stories featuring the young Josie and her family, who are dealing with the sudden departure of their father - and concluding with Dora on the Beach, about a retiree living on Atlantic Beach who is "held hostage" by two teenage girls on vacation.
One of the best stories in this book is the titular "The Guy Not Taken", about a slightly unhappy married woman with a baby who gets an unexpected (and fantastical) opportunity to see what her life would have been like if she had stayed with her former boyfriend. How many of us actually get a chance to see if life is greener on the other side of the fence? (As an aside, this story has been optioned to be a movie.)
Overall, the quality of the stories in the collection is high. The reader gets a sense of the character of the people in the stories, which is unusual and frequently difficult for an author to accomplish in the limited pages of a short story. I guess that speaks highly of Weiner's characterization ability. Of course, if you are a big Weiner fan and are used to the fully developed plots and characterizations of her novels, you might be slightly disappointed. As for me, I found almost all of these stories to be delightlful "slices of life".
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