You Probably Don’t Want to Know What I Think About “You Know What I Think?”
The book is “You Know What I Think?” by Stephanie Barnfather. It’s a collection of 13 short stories and it’s available on Amazon Kindle here.
Short stories are harder than they look. Generally, they need to have all the components of a regular story, just compressed way, way down. A short story has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needs a comprehensible narrative structure and a writing style that doesn’t alienate the reader -- but instead grabs the reader by the throat and demands each page turn. Characters need to be sympathetic, if not empathetic. Above all, a short story has to deliver entertainment and, after finishing, satisfaction.
Short stories are harder than they look, and short story collections compound those challenges, requiring the author to pull off a feat of literary genius over and over and over again.
I purchased “You Know What I Think?” on the strength of the Look Inside preview, which was essentially a story about giant robotic landscapers and a little girl’s favorite sweater. Before clicking buy, I did a rough skim of the preview and was impressed with what I saw in this self-published tome: competent writing. Alright, I’ll give it a shot.
It took a few weeks to circle back, and when I did, I started by re-reading the first story. My initial optimism was confirmed, but red flags did abound, providing a dire portent of where this review would ultimately spiral. The thing is, I really wanted to like this collection of short stories. I wanted to support an indie author and the Twitter writing community. I wanted my past experiences in this particular community to be erased with one decent, positive experience.
I have a lot of notes -- all rooted in critical analysis and general feedback -- but reviews are friggen dumb. Book reviews, especially so. They’re the most biased, subjective reviews imaginable because, unlike a film where all audiences see the same thing, a book is based on a tacit agreement between author and reader: an idea that starts in the author’s imagination is designed to be completed in the reader’s imagination. In an attempt to provide context and grounding to my critique, I will focus on three fundamental categories.
READABILITY (the mechanics of writing)
4/5 stars
Personally, I prefer short, fast reads. I like page-turners where I feel like I’m making constant progress without having to slog through the author’s writing style. Short stories aside, Barnfather’s style is mostly clean and straightforward.
The writing is (almost) always competent, which means I didn’t see any apparent typos, and sentences and dialogue were assembled in a coherent, easy-to-read fashion. This may sound silly to acknowledge and compliment, but the fact is that I’ve had a hard time finding competent writing amongst the self-published authors pushing their wares on Twitter.
PREMISE, STORY, STRUCTURE (the mechanics of storytelling)
2/5 stars
This is my core critique of Barnfather’s writing. The ideas are good, if not straight-up clever. But the execution? In story #1, the execution is okay, but it could have been so much better. By story #10, the execution had devolved to thread-bare window dressing for a premise that gets lost in ineffectual word count filler.
Let’s chalk it up to writing all the stories at once, in linear order, and simply not leaving a premise in the oven for long enough.
For example, the first story about the mechanical landscapers (and the best overall story in the collection) falls emotionally flat because of a need for an emotional connection with the cast of characters.
Later, in the second story, “In Blankets,” the scope of a story about mysterious child abductions is widened to include a more expansive cast and a whole town -- but there was the same issue of finding an emotional connection with characters. Without the connection, I had difficulty tracking who the story was about or even who a specific character was supposed to be. I don’t mind doing a little bit of work, but as a reader, I’m holding my hand out to the author so the author can take me on a journey. By the time I got to the end of “In Blankets,” I finally decoded the punny names (more on this later), one character’s strange barbecue dinner, and (kind of) inferred the antagonist (?) Barnfather was driving at ... but it left me with more questions than answers. Was the point to be punny? Was there a deeper meaning and some social commentary about sending our “little piggies” off to the slaughter? I don’t know, and I’m not sure Barnfather knows either.
Finally, let’s talk about an example where the story and structure let down the premise. Story #3 is “Cargo Movement” and is about a society confined to cars (a theme repeated in the hot air balloon story, which I have notes on below). The premise is the best in the book -- genuinely clever and compelling! It speaks to the pandemic, car-obsessed culture, and what it means to be truly -- TRULY -- stuck with a partner. And with all that clever groundwork establishing the premise, the story just ... stops. It doesn’t get to a point or give me an ending, and I’m not even sure there’s any actual conflict. This is a trend that continues to get worse with each story.
MISCELLANEOUS
1/5 stars
Easily-researchable factual missteps are hard to excuse. Some of it is pet peeve territory, but part of the job of being an author is not giving readers such low-hanging reasons to abandon the book.
A calico cat is referenced in one of the stories -- this is a sore point because I just saw this mistake in a less-than-great movie, too -- and the author repeatedly refers to the calico as a “he.” Male calicos are born with genetic defects that keep them from reaching adulthood, meaning 90% of calicos are female. It’s a tiny detail repeated frequently throughout entertainment, but also really easy to fix.
A piece of throwaway dialogue in “Vanity Uprising” refers to a 2003 Chevy Impala as a “tiny little thing.” While typically a full-size sedan, the ‘03 model was one of two generations of Impalas classified as “mid-sized.” So if an Impala was a tiny little thing, I’d be curious as to what a Miata or Fiat would be described as.
A story about a society living in the sky by way of hot air balloons (literally: “Hot Airs”) suggests hot air balloons are steerable (they aren’t) and they require helium (they really, really don’t). Hot air balloons are navigated primarily in vertical directions by way of propane burners, and the best attempt at steering is to soar up or down into wind currents.
As mentioned before, character names are occasionally (mostly) punny. This can be fun and clever in satire, but it got old, distracting, and confusing after a while. The worst of it -- and this is when I really started losing interest in the collection -- was a story in the back half of the book about a pair of private investigators with inverted names: Addi Peterson and Peter Addison. With the consistent lack of compelling character development and description, the names of these two characters (and then the primary use of their last names -- again, without any fundamental description of who was who) made me throw my hands up in defeat. It was hard to follow, and the author gave me little reason to try or even care.
OVERALL
2/5 stars
This collection of short stories is easily summed up as a series of great premises paired with weak execution. The major caveat is that Barnfather demonstrates very competent writing; she just needs to leave the stories in the oven for a little longer.
While I can’t recommend this short story collection (although, again, that first story is worth a skim!), I do look forward to Barnfather’s next release. There’s more than enough potential in her ideas and writing competency alone that it’s all but guaranteed that she’ll nail story and structure with a little more practice.
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