Pamela's Reviews > Faulty Predictions: Stories

Karin Lin-Greenberg's stories have a deceptively gentle and comic surface--she's an adept satirist and catches the quirky ways in which people converse and interact in a wide variety of settings. But percolating beneath is a lot of feeling, above all the feeling of grief over imperfect human connection. The range of protagonists here is impressive--young men, elderly women, and Chinese immigrants; bus drivers and the offspring of the famous. Lin-Greenberg seems to have the confidence and imagination to go most anywhere. Sometimes, there's a surprising and very effective twist at the end, as in "Editorial Decisions," or, more quietly, "Bread," one of my favorite stories in the collection, along with "Prized Possessions" and "Designated Driver."