Everything in Between - Valerie G. Miller

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Author: Valerie G. Miller

Genre: Short Story Anthology, Contemporary Fiction.
Rating: 3 stars.

A collection of eleven short stories about “families, loss, and love”.

This anthology should have been right up my alley. I love short stories, I love drama-based content much more than thrillers, and I loved the theme of this collection. Unfortunately, my experience was underwhelming.

On the positive side, all the stories cater to the theme well. The characters and the situations feel very realistic. The author is an Italian-Australian, so there are many Italian and Australian words in the stories. (There is a glossary at the end for these words.) All the stories are written from the point of view of female characters, and each of these is an Italian. (After a point, this becomes boring.)

However, the story development didn’t work for me much. Some of them go all over the place, with there being no connection between the start and the end. While I liked the concept of most of the stories, I was really disappointed with the endings. Except for one story, every other tale ended abruptly, leaving me feeling deprived. I don’t mind open endings any time, but they need to be at the point where the reader is left enamoured and not like someone slapped them unexpectedly.

As always, I rated the stories individually, and most of them ended up between 3 and 4 stars simply because the ending gave me indigestion. The only story that was PERFECT for me in every sense was “The Promise”, an epistolary story that is developed beautifully and incorporates amazing twists and a wonderful ending. “Bookmarked Letters” came a very close second.

If you are more open-minded about endings in short-stories, and want to read a collection with a variety of female characters (while still paying an ode to the Italian residents of Australia), you could give this a try.

3.1 stars based on the average of my rating for all the stories.

My thanks to BooksGoSocial and NetGalley for the DRC of “Everything in Between”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book.

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