Ellen Cassidy is a Michigan author. The book How to Save a Misfit contains six longer stories — not novellas, and not short stories. I read all 116 pages in one day because Cassidy’s stories were a world into which I could easily exist and settle.

The first story earned my respect and kept me reading. A woman in her 60s who has never married finds yoga and its benefits. In the class is a rather rank man who never wears a shirt, and she seems incapable of getting over it. Instead, she is drawn to another man, about her age, and they agree to go out for Bloody Marys after class. The pair immediately establish this is not a date, this is the start of a friendship. And that’s exactly how the story proceeds. It was completely refreshing reading both platonic intimacy between a man and woman and older characters who aren’t stereotyped.

The six long stories are connected by place, particularly a dive bar called Suki’s. None of the connections feel forced, though, as sometimes happens with books marketed as interconnected short story collections. Sometimes, I couldn’t remember if I’d met the main character as a secondary or tertiary character in a previous story; however, the individual gradually came to me, and I would think, “Oh, year, this is so-and-so from the other story.” I enjoyed that, like running into someone at the store and wondering if you know them from work, school, the neighborhood, etc. How to Save a Misfit surely benefits from a reread because you could remember the basic plots and see the connections more clearly second time around.

One thing I’ve grown weary of that Cassidy avoids is stories about lower-middleclass people, typically blue-collar workers, who are written as too dark, too edgy, or they think the “real” world doesn’t get them because the “real” world has never juggled community college, factory work, addiction, and living in a mobile home. Now, I appreciate that what I just described is a reality for millions of people, yet authors frequently fail to acknowledge a modicum of happiness—maybe a pet, a plant the character takes care of, a funny coworker…just, something — that rounds out life. Cassidy writes her stories in a natural way that keeps the seams from being exposed. Instead, the reader feels like she’s just there, listening in on a conversation instead of reading a book.

books of winter 🎄❄️⛄

• Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
• Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Deder (DNF)
• This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan
• Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer
• Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho
• Suggs Black Backtracks by Martha Ann Spencer (DNF)
• Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (DNF)
• The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan (#11)
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy
• The Road to Helltown by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs series #9) (finished — special review forthcoming at a later date)
• Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
• Jaws by Peter Benchley
• The New York trilogy by Paul Auster
• The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead by Chanelle Benz
• All of Me by Venise Berry
• At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck
• Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
• Touched by Kim Kelly
• Awakened by Laura Elliott
• After Life by Andrew Neiderman