Deborah Craytor
3.5 stars I have not previously read anything by Sophie Hannah, but somehow I had the impression that she writes crime novels, so I was interested to see how she would do in her debut collection of short fiction, The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets. After finishing the book, I looked at Hannah's author page on Goodreads and discovered that, in 2004, her story "Octopus Nest" took first prize in the Daphne du Maurier Festival Short Story Competition, and that story, which serves as the lead in this collection, is indeed stellar. Hannah keeps the terror at a fever pitch from the very first sentence before neatly redirecting it at the very end. Unfortunately, while the trip with Hannah starts and ends with a bang (the final story, "The Most Enlightened Person I've Ever Met," also garnered 5 stars), the middle is quite bumpy. The order of the stories appears unusually deliberate because the only other 5-star entry, "The Nursery Bear," is smack in the middle at #6, with stories 2 through 5 and 7 through 9 being much weaker. There are some other stories deserving of appreciation: "Twelve Noon," which traps us in the skewed logic of an elderly woman trying to understand a road sign on her first drive in 10 years, and "You Are a Gongedip" (don't ask), whose pretentious narrator leaps fully formed from the page with the first sentence, both received 4 stars. Their pleasures, however, were outweighed by the 1-star "The Tub," involving a revolting sexual encounter after a breakup over (of all things) bubble bath, and the 2-star "We All Say What We Want" and "Herod's Valentines." Even the titular "The Fantastic Book of Everybody's Secrets," which is based on the same social experiment as the PostSecret books, takes an inherently interesting premise and goes nowhere with it. Interestingly, with the exception of "The Nursery Bear" at 28 pages, the best stories were also the shortest, ranging from 5 to 13 pages, while the worst ranged from 24 to 53 pages. What this tells me is that Hannah may write good stories under 20 pages and novels hundreds of pages long, but she has a "dead zone" when it comes to novellas. Readers should make their selections accordingly. This review was based on a free ARC provided by the publisher.
