No Thanks: And Other Stories

Sarah Jane Smith's frustrating No Thanks and Other Stories revolves around a family home in Michigan and might best be described as northern gothic. The bitter, eccentric matriarch, Valerie, goes mad and commits suicide. Prospects for the house and all connected to it are grim, especially when Valerie's widower marries a shrew of a woman who becomes a constant source of annoyance for unstable daughter Clara. Smith does have talent, which is best exhibited in her descriptions of the natural world, but she also tends to overwrite, and readers will likely find it hard to penetrate the fragmented, almost hallucinatory narrative.