The Curse of the Appropriate Man

Rating:
Summary: One sentence propels this from 4 to 5 stars
Review: At last, a collection of stories from the preeminent female novelist of our day. Freed is an author who goes straight into the world's landscapes, both interior and exterior. You can have your Morrisons and your Smileys and your Gordimers, Lynn Freed is the most fearless contemporary female writer at work today. In any language. And this book serves as proof.

Make no mistake, Freed is a better novelist than short story writer, and there are one or two stories in this collection that don't live up to the rest. However, those stories would be flagships in any one else's collection. So as I prepared to award four stars to this collection, I looked the book over again and came across a line in the story "An Error of Desire" that made it obvious why this is a five-star book: "There is love and there is desire, I thought, and for all the world they look the same until all the desire is spent." Freed is a writer with a rare brilliance that shows itself in her humor, her syntax, and her understanding of the devil and the saint in each of us.