A very Southern set of stories. ( )

3.5 stars

Best quote: "The human race. You have to love it and wish it well and not preach or think you have any reason to think you are better than anyone else. Amen. Good-bye. Peace…" ( )

Yet another fantabulous collection of Gilchrist short stories, including a delicious epistolary one featuring Rhoda that had me snorting in shul this morning. Gilchrist is the only writer I know who can make an act of suicide say something about living. Love, love, love and live. ( )

I read this slim volume of short stories while I was in New Orleans, which is the perfect place to read Ellen Gilchrist. Some of our favorite friends are here - especially Anna Hand's niece and the irrepressible Rhoda Manning - and each story shows how acts of love and caring can illuminate a life Ellen Gilchrist never disappoints. ( )

I have been a fan of Ellen Gilchrist's for many years and when I saw this new collection of short stories, I was very much looking forward to reading it. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Don't get me wrong. There are some great moments in Acts of God, but there are also stories that cover so much ground chronologically and don't envelop the reader because it seems as if the theme or the idea is more important than the characters' relationships to them.

Most of the stories are about upheaval or disasters and human reaction to them. Perhaps the best is the one in which a young woman who is in the Air National Guard is called to New Orleans to rescue people from roofs after Katrina. This is one of the few stories in which a virtuous act is not cushioned by selfishness or self-absorption, but one in which the character reacts to horrors and the small miracles and feels changed and is changed.

Perhaps a couple of the other stories ring true simply because the characters are materialistic and self-absorbed and view an extraordinary situation from the viewpoint of what they can get from it or what it will make them into. There is some heavy-handedness with what I consider to be preachiness and I am not certain that it's Gilchrist's intent for that to be unleashed upon the reader (because I am giving her the benefit of the doubt), but then again, it's been years since I have read any of her work and maybe what I once overlooked is now an elephant. ( )