Review: Love and Profanity, Edited by Nick Healy

Happy Short Story Month everyone! (These are technically essays, but they read like short stories, so I'm counting it as my short story read for the month)

I picked up my copy of Love and Profanity: True, Tortured, Wild, Hilarious, and Intense Tales of Teenage Life at my local independent book store. Yay! And yeah, that's a ton of adjectives to have in a title, but the stories in this volume really lived up to it.

I'm not really a short story or an essay person, I'll be honest, so I was even more impressed that I really loved the stories here. It was interesting to see the real stories of childhood by some authors I recognized (namely Pete Hautman, who wrote several young adult novels I've enjoyed, and Jon Scieszka, who wrote my favorite picture book ever). Short stories don't fulfill my craving for longterm character growth and development and yet, I felt like I got a little taste of that growth and development in each of these stories in its own way.

The range of the stories was really impressive. This volume had everything from tales of bullying, triumph, sadness, joy and happiness. The order and separation of the stories made sense, which I've found to be a challenge in order short story collections that I've read.

There are forty-three stories in the volume, the longest only a couple of pages. They each offer a moment-long glimpse into the live of another person, another writer, another teen experience. At times the stories seemed to demand my complicity and other times they seemed wrongly voyeuristic, most so in the story "Saying Goodbye to Anna," the tale of a teen overcoming anorexia.

The writing styles also varied quite a bit. Some stories felt incomplete while others filled me with emotion, be it happiness or sadness. Some were eloquent, while others were gritty. They all felt to be a little bit nostalgic and most felt a little dated, but in a good way. The datedness and the fact that I could still relate to these stories made me feel like yes, there are some parts of the teen experience that are indeed universal, carrying across time and space.

I enjoyed seeing perspectives from a variety of types of writers: everything from bloggers to picture book writers to teen writers and everything in between. Finding this in the young adult section of a bookstore, I expected there to be more stories by teen writers I recognized, but I enjoyed looking up some of these authors after I finished the book.

Each story felt like a new experience, a new glimpse. And yet they were all threaded together into four parts and one cohesive volume. I would recommend this collection of diverse, vibrant stories to anyone who enjoys short stories or enjoys reading about teen life. Read for several stories about love, friendship, heartbreak, isolation and ultimately growing up.

4/5 stars