Where The God of Love Hangs Out by Amy Bloom

Despite the inevitable pain of loss, people are drawn to the comforts of love

These short stories are all about the voice, which is very vivid and lively. Amy Bloom is a beautiful prose stylist. Every paragraph is its own short story, larded with imagery, a miniflashback. As a result, the characters are fully rounded, breathing, bleeding. The subject is love and its corollary, death, which at times seems trite but all the characters take love so seriously. They take life seriously. Love is imaginary until you are afflicted by it then it feels biological, bringing insight. However, is it the proper subject for a serious author?

The structure is a little unusual – these are short stories, but with two large lumps of linked short stories. I liked the first one – the one about the couple in their fifties who run off together better than the second one, the one about the jazz singer, which felt like a sketched in novel.

Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom

Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom


An overweight bookish teen upends the life of her high school teacher as well as the star basketball player.

The prose is dense, evocative, delightful. But I just didn’t buy that all these people would pine away from love for this kid – change their lives, destroy their lives. As love can do. But when you fall in love with a 17 year old kid, aren’t you falling in love with something other than an unformed tentative soul?  Aren't you sort of falling in love with yourself?  That was not depicted.   There’s very many moving parts in this novel that might not add up to a coherent statement about whether love invents us or not – love can certainly lead you into a ditch – that’s what I learned from this story. I guess it’s about Elizabeth, (the 17 year old) reviewing the motley loves in her life – perhaps only one lover didn’t want anything (anything sordid) from her. However, it was very readable and hard to put down.