Predictable. Pleasant. Puffy.

A bowl of Rice Krispies has nothing on this bland little collection of stories about things that almost happen and people that almost change. Lots of phrases that pop explosively in your literary mouth as you chew on them but leave only a little milky residue on your book-tongue; eg: "She reached forward, and a spark of static electricity went from her forefinger to his. It startled him, and he realized the ember of energy could not be accidental. It was a sign. After all, electricity was a special power, his field." (from "Months and Seasons," p121)

A movie industry party brings together a lying clerical worker and a naive, boring electrician and sparks fly. So what? After the brief blat of that paragraph, the best one in this title story of the collection, there is little left to be said about this collection except, if you like that example, you'll like the book. If you take my advice, you'll spend those fifteen dollars on other books with more staying power and better craftsmanship.

Novelist David Scott Milton ("Kabbalah", a delightful suspense novel) blurbed Meeks' first collection by comparing him to Raymond Carver. Blasphemy! Outrage and rioting should shake the literary world to its roots! This writer, now on his second collection of stories ("The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea", apparently an award winner, was first) and with a published play-script under his belt ("Who Lives?"), barring something enormous changing in his life, ain't getting any better. ( )

Christopher Meeks stories are full of people who push through the obstacles of life and overcome their deepest fears in order to find joy in living. Months and Seasons, Meeks second collection of short stories is a delightful book which introduces the reader to characters who are ordinary, but in their ordinariness remind us of the common threads which bind people together.

In the story Catalina, we meet a man who is traveling to Catalina via a catamaran. He is grieving the loss of his son. He meets a woman on the boat who optimistically tells him that Catalina is ‘like a persimmon - unexpected fruit on a naked tree.‘ The man’s discovery that there is still beauty in the world, despite his devastating loss, allows him to go forward into his life. This simple story is an example of the hope which Meeks infuses into all of his stories as his characters confront their fears of aging, mortality and the sometimes insurmountable challenges of relationships.

In some stories, the characters must battle their own inner demons to make sense of the world and their place within it. In A Shoe Falls, Max must evaluate his marriage to Alice - a woman who clutters the house with her shoes. He wakes from a dream about owing a cab driver $150,000 and thinks:

' …if the ride was getting so expensive and monotonous, why hadn’t he asked the cab driver to let him off? Why hadn’t he done more than sit there, bouncing in the back seat pondering his sanity? He was a passive man, goddamn it. -From Months and Seasons, A Shoe Falls, page 72-'

Max’s inner journey in this story looks at how one man (who could be any of us) examines his “dreams” in the face of his reality. Will he be able to overcome regret for what he has does not have in order to accept what is?

My favorite story of the collection is Breaking Water - which opens with a supermodel awakening from open heart surgery. Merrill appears to have lost everything of importance in her life - her career as a model, her marriage, and her vision of who she is. She must begin again and turns toward art school as a possible answer. Merrill’s story is one of falling down and getting back up again; of finding hope in the midst of despair. It touched me.

And this is perhaps the strength of the collection - in showing us the lives of these ordinary characters, Meeks exposes what is human in all of us. Who has never felt life was not living up to expectation? Or looked at the years unraveling and wondered if we had the time to do everything we wanted? Or experienced a loss so big that hope seemed irretrievable? Or found our fears so encompassing we felt paralyzed to overcome them? Meeks explores these ideas with humor and sensitivity, and creates a collection hard to put down.

For those readers who love short stories, Months and Seasons is a must read. Highly recommended. ( )

“Months and Seasons” is a particularly refreshing book of short stories. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of short stories whose characters and situations seem so varied, even though most were males in the United States. Even the narration style was varied, alternating between first- and third-person, even a story in second-person narration, which is fairly unusual.

From the very first story, I felt close to the protagonists. It was as if a friend or close acquaintance was recounting a night, day, week, or year from his or her life. The characters all seemed quirky and easy to relate to. Meeks is very talented in being able to flesh out his characters in very few pages. Actually, perhaps a better analogy than a friend or acquaintance telling you the story, they seemed like stories one might overhear on a train or in an airport. They were stories that did not always give you a large degree of background on the characters, but still made them seem like real people.

Overall, I think this is a lovely story collection and it is one that I can definitely recommend. ( )

Christopher Meeks sent me a copy of his latest collection, Months and Seasons a while back and I’ve been eager to read it. I love the cover and the descriptions of his stories sounded interesting. After finishing a 600+ page novel, a collection of short stories for my next read seemed like a wonderful change of pace. For the first few stories, it was. In the end, however, I was happy to get back to the world of novels.

I am not someone who frequently reads short stories. It isn’t that I don’t like short stories, but novels simply are my preference. While I enjoyed Meek’s characters, most especially Frank in “The Holes in My Door,” I found myself wanting more. When I finish reading a good novel, it feels like a complete experience. If I don’t, it’s a sign that the book didn’t work for me. With short stories, this is intensified for me. This isn’t necessarily about the quality of the story, but about the structure of the genre. During my reading of Months and Seasons, I kept having questions: What followed the night of the Halloween party in “Dracula Slinks into the Night?” How did Albert’s life change after “The Sun is a Billiard Ball” finished? Unlike, “Did Rhett and Scarlett get back together?”, they weren’t satisfying questions for me. I don’t need (and usually don’t want) to have everything neatly tied up in a bow at the end of a novel. I just need enough to go on to make my own conclusions. I typically don’t find this in short stories.

Christopher Meeks is a talented writer. If he writes a novel, I will be one of the first in line to read it. Please dont’ let me issues with short stories keep you away from this book. I would highly recommend his short stories to those who enjoy reading short stories.

http://literatehousewife.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/101-months-and-seaons/ ( )

This is Christopher Meeks second book of short stories and I'm sorry that I haven't read his first, which was an award winning collection. I read these 11 stories through the first time for pleasure and it was that. I like them a lot. The characters here, whether humourous, tragic, or mildly absurd are likeable, believable, and not always predictable. Like ordinary people, but with quirks that make them memorable. I haven't had a collection of short stories stay with me as vividly for quite some time. Even better, when I looked back through them I realized that there's not a weak one in the bunch. The author clearly edited himself, choosing and arranging this group of stories carefully. I've always preferred longer short stories so I wasn't surprised that "The Sun is a Billard Ball" at 32 pages in length would appeal to me. Or the 25 page "Breaking Water". But even "Catalina" at only 3 pages is a solid and emotionally powerful account of a man's unexpressed grief . I read it several times because what the author doesn't say is as telling as what he does. This is the sign of a good writer. In the first of these three stories, the uncertainties and fears of impending illness and diagnosis are palpable, the tension is familiar and real. In the third a Greek American man, advised by an acquaintance to spend the day on Catalina Island, is angry and judgmental until " he is surprised to see that the dry hills leaping from the water were like the Chora Sfakion in Crete. His friend must have known."
There's a wide range in age and emotional experience of his characters. Whether it's a seven year old who's afraid of water in the more lyrical "The Wind Just Right " or a seventy-eight year old playwright losing his home and life's work to wildfires in" The Old Topanga Incident", Meeks is capable of seeing and writing from very different perspectives. He shows great versitility too by writing in the voice that most suits each story. His use of the first person singular for the main character of "The Holes In My Door" lets us into the depression and obsessive fears of this recently seperated man who's slipping into paranoid behaviour. Any other perspective would not have had the same power. The use of the second person in the "Topango" story work well too. "You open the door" to shouting firemen,"you run down two flights of stairs", "you grab the play, the only copy", "you wonder whether you can make it through this". The urgency and loss is keenly felt by the reader, it's perfect.
I especially enjoyed the title story "Months and Seasons". The main character is determined that the love of his life will have the name of one of the months or seasons of the year. He won't even date someone who doesn't fit the bill. This tale about putting limits on our own fate is touching and funny. When a woman at a party introduces herself as "August" I laughed out loud. Meeks creates believable female characters too as in the final story "Breaking Water", where a model must reshape her entire life after heart surgery. Her inability to get pregnant causes her husband to abandon her, but not until after she has recovered from surgery. He doesn't want to look bad after all. We are rooting for her at every new turn in her life. This is a great collection of stories that I look forward to reading again. Highly recommended.

There's icing on the cake here too with "The Hand", an excerpt from "The Brightest Moon of the Century" at the end of the book. This novel in the form of related short stories will cover 30 years in the life of a young Minnesotan named Edward. The first of these stories made me want to know more about what happens to Edward. Given this writer's gifted sense of storytelling, I expect this new book will be a winner too. ( )