3 out of 4 stars
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Covering a vast majority of scenes, eras, religions, and characters Illustrated Short Fiction of William H. Coles:2000-2016 by William H. Coles takes you on a journey through all of this, with no two characters alike and even including two comics based on their respective stories and a novella as extra features.
With this collection of stories I had to rate each one individually; as a result, I liked some stories but not other ones. I found that with some characters well rounded and developed, while others faded into the background after the first few sentences. I also found that I couldn't follow the story at times. Other times the story was going too fast with the first part being the main part of the story and the second part being little details that as a reader I could have done without.
I have mixed feelings about the illustrations that accompanied each story. Some I loved while others lacked a certain appeal. This includes the comics toward the end of the book. Some included really beautiful imagery, while others were mostly nonsense that made no sense, not even when you read the story that went along with it. The illustrations I did like were colorful and I had a feeling about what the accompanying selection was going to be about before I even looked at the title.
One thing I did like was how William H. Cole managed to capture the essence of the era and the situation of the characters involved. While I didn't like some of the characters involved in the story I was reading I could relate to all the situations and live in the era that their story takes place.
Another thing likable about these works is how the author manages to capture the dialects native to each character. The upper-class people speak English more proper than the drawl used in other areas of the country and Coles manages to capture both extremes along with the middle ground perfectly.
I give the Illustrated Short Fiction of William H. Coles: 2000-2016 a 3 out of 4 stars because of some great illustrations, the roundness of the characters, making the reader feel in the moment with all the characters throughout all the short stories, and managing to capture the situation, dialect, and status of all characters with the detractors of sometimes moving too fast or too slow and sometimes not managing to capture the entire picture.
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Illustrated Short Fiction of William H. Coles: 2000-2016
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