Two Hundred Very Short Stories - Helen Keeling-Marston

4.5 Stars

ABOUT THE BOOK -

Two Hundred Very Short Stories is a collection of stories each so short that the reader can start … and finish … a whole one in one night – some even in a minute! Recognizing that many people don’t have enough time for regular reading – and thus can easily lose the thread of a novel – Helen Keeling-Marston set about writing a collection of short stories. Two Hundred Very Short Stories – Helen’s first book – features an eclectic mix of short stories and flash fiction: flash fiction being works of extreme brevity. Similar to a musical mix tape, the collection of stories aims to elicit a range of different emotions from the reader: joy, sadness, amusement, befuddlement, intrigue and fear. Be warned, however, that you’ll need to have your wits about you when reading this book, as Two Hundred Very Short Stories isn’t always a passive experience!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR -
Helen Keeling-Marston was born in Staffordshire, England, in 1980. After studying for a maths degree at the University of Bath, she moved to Hampshire and began a career as an analyst. In addition to Helen’s number crunching, she has set up, and runs, a UK sports charity, she writes articles for women’s sports magazines and she dabbles in classical composing and creative writing.
Visit Helen’s website  and on Twitter, - @helenkeeling, and on Facebook.


MY THOUGHTS -
When Helen contacted me and asked if I would be interested in her book of 200 very short stories I wasn't quite sure what to think. I was intrigued so I said - sure.

Well I never thought this would be such a gem of a little book. You got a minute? Well that's about what it'll take to read one of these. Some are a couple pages long and some are only a paragraph. Some are funny, some are interesting and some are brilliant and a few will even leave you thinking - huh? But all of them are entertaining!

I can see a family grabbing this book and reading a few out loud at the dinner table and discussing them after, each member of the family having a different take on the story.

This is one of my favorites -

"Try it out,” he urged her. “See if it’s comfortable.”
The svelte queen amazed her people by jumping from the white jack-in-a-box, she typed.
“What did the quick brown fox ever do to you?” he asked.
“He jumped over the lazy dog,” she replied. “He should have skirted around him.”
“But that wouldn’t have worked,” he reasoned. “Unless the quick brown fox skirted around the lazy, jaded dog on the pavement.”
“It’s not just the brown fox that’s quick,” she said, typing out his new sentence to check that it contained every letter of the alphabet.

I voluntarily posted this review after receiving a copy of this book from the author Helen Keeling-Marston -  Thank You!

Order your copy from Amazon - HERE