“The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories”

A.C. Wise

I continue to like short story collections and anthologies, because there’s less of a sense of obligation to them. In this case, I probably only read 2/3 of the stories—a fair few just didn’t stick as I was starting them, and I thought, oh well, it’s just a few pages to skim past.

Wise’s writing style is distinctly more poetic in character than I tend to go for, and I think that was a lot of what lead me to skip as many of the stories as I did. At least as I was reading, I wasn’t in the headspace to be putting quite that much effort in; maybe this was the wrong book for the moment, but it’s the one I was reading, so.

Even the ones I did read don’t felt like they stuck to my mind super well.1

I did like the note it ended on, though—a weird little high school love story mashed up with a horror movie in a fun way. And it successfully got a song stuck in my head, so that’s something!

At the end, I don’t know that I’d give this book my usual highly-positive “go read it” review; maybe see if your local library has it and come to your own decision?

Admittedly, part of that may be because I finished reading this book after going for a swim, and my brain feels like it’s about 35% chlorine at the moment. ↩