Flick’s flash stories of love, loss, and escape focus on making a human connection with everyday people.
Sherrie Flick
Short Stories | 200 Pages | 5.25” x 8” | Reviewed: Kindle ARC
9781938769351 | First Edition | $17.99
Autumn House Press | Pittsburgh | BUY HERE
One of the most important aspects of literature is that it has the ability to hold a mirror to humanity and make people look inside themselves. People lead busy lives in a fast-paced world and rarely take the time to examine their innermost selves. Sherrie Flick’s Thank Your Lucky Stars is one of those books that focuses on people’s thoughts and feelings, such as love, loss, and a need to escape. One way she accomplishes this is by focusing on everyday people, unlike much of fiction today. The reader isn’t facing a hardened police detective with a dark past or a movie star in a desperate situation. The characters in these stories could be anyone found on the street.
Many of the stories are character-driven instead of action-driven. These aren’t stories about world-changing events, but more about individual people coming to a self-realization. The interesting concept with these stories is that these acts of self-reflection feel just as important as the high-tension dramatic events seen in other popular novels and movies.
Flick uses her stories to focus on different aspects of human nature. In “Lenny the Suit Man,” the main character is Bob, a nearly anonymous office worker, who has recently been dumped by his longtime girlfriend. Flick uses Bob to show how people can go through the coping process after their hearts have been broken:
“Yes, I know. I’m damaged goods for a long time to come. I’m wrapped in plastic and taped at weird angles.”
In “Open and Shut,” Sarah and John are in the middle of what seems like a perfectly happy relationship, but on a deeper level, the story explores the fickle nature of human relationships. Both characters are living in the present with each other, but at the same time, they are constantly thinking about a future time when they will no longer be together. Sarah also spends a great deal of time thinking about her past boyfriend and the ups and downs of that relationship. Neither can manage to be happy with what he has in the now.
In another story, “Expectations,” Flick explores the notion of people falling more in love with ideas than with the reality. Sarah, an everyday woman, is in the beginning stages of a separation. But Sarah doesn’t concern herself with the reality of what went right or wrong in her marriage, and the overwhelming emotion that drives her doesn’t seem to be grief, but rather, regret over what might have been:
“I miss what I wanted us to be.”
Flick’s stories are told in short bursts, never taking more than a few pages, but still she manages to get a great deal of detail in a small space. Her writing is sometimes choppy and a little scattered, with frequent jumps in time, but this adds to the stories by giving them a human feeling, the jumbled thoughts of human connection. There is also a vagueness in the characters, many of them sharing the same name, that implies the stories could be connected somehow, but a definite answer is never given. The reader is left to make the final decision. Flick’s writing does an admirable job of capturing the human emotional experience and allowing the reader to connect to her characters.
