4 out of 4 stars
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Illustrated Short Fiction of William H. Coles 2000-2016 is one of the most amazing novels I’ve read so far. It has 34 stories with two more stories that are graphic novels of already given chapters in the book.
Since it is a collection of short stories, I was a little skeptical to read it, thinking whether all of them will be interesting or if some of them will let my hopes up for nothing. But I must tell you that I never expected to read these kind of stories ever. The fictions were written precisely, dealing with the reality that we live in, not some fairy-tale story. Each and every one of them had a very deep meaning which was not gone unnoticed.
In this book, there is a story of a woman dealing with heartbreak and indecision of whether she should have liked the person in the first place or was it just a mistake; a story of how a boy struggles to help his father in getting her mother to a place where she can be saved from her illness; a story of a man who deals with a judgmental society but gets help from someone he least expected; etc. These fictions had nice plots and dealt with each and every subject of the society we live in.
At some point, I felt that I won’t be able to continue reading this book since it had a lot of sad endings continuously. But I later realized that I should accept the fact that not every story has a happy ending and in real life, we can face such circumstances as were written in the book. I’m not discouraging anyone from reading this novel, in fact I would like everyone to read it for once. It was like an eye opener for me. Till now, I’ve read a lot of fiction novels that had happy endings. I don’t know if any of you do this but I had a habit of reading the ending before choosing the book. It was satisfying if it had a happy ending, but if it wasn’t, then I would skip it.
Choosing this one was not planned. I just wanted to read something different from what I usually read, which are fictions with happy endings. But this book made me intrigued to read other fictions too, which I might have missed reading before. I liked all the stories.
The book contains a few spelling errors like use of articles in a sentence unnecessarily, but that didn’t affect my flow of reading. There are a few chapters where grammatically wrong English is used or words are written to show the accent the character uses. Those chapters were a little bit hard to read but I completed them no matter how long it took me to understand them. At first I thought those chapters needed major editing, but later, I realized that the author had written those dialogues on purpose. I was quite impressed by the effort the author had put in this book to make it seem like they were inspired from real life stories. There was nothing in this book that I didn't like.
All in all, I’d be glad to rate this book 4 out of 4 stars. I will recommend this to readers of all ages. Only two stories from this book have too much detailing which can be unnerving to read by readers below the age of 18, but it is better if you can skip those stories because other 32 stories are worth reading.
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Illustrated Short Fiction of William H. Coles: 2000-2016
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