Customer Reviews
An elegant example of craft - By: Caroline_LS, 14 Jun 2008 
Susan Wicks is a poet, a rather wonderful poet, & her short story collection is strikingin many different ways.
Within Roll Up for the Arabian Derby, Wicks controls the language & the fine detail with the craft of a poet. As expected, there is a feeling that each & every word has been chosen precisely. There is an elegance to the prose, lyrical turns of phrase & her stories are never awkward.
The stories compliment, contrast & link with invisible thread. The visuals are perfect & within them there is normality. Familiar objects,tastes & experiences are all given an angle from the carefully selected words. The voices are each distinct, each variedin tone & always easy to read. There is a ease that joins & obscures as the stories unravel.
But perhaps the most striking feature, is the control of the craft. Susan Wicks directs the reader, dripping information, feeding detail as she pleases. At times, I was hit with the feeling that I had entered a story away from the beginning & that I had to read that little bit more intently to pick up clues as to what had occurred previously. For me, this marks Susan Wicks as both a confident & an experienced teller of tales.
The storytelling leaves gaps & occasionally ends before conclusion. The reader is left to infer from the allowed leaking of details. There is the creation of back stories & the continuing of plots, without the words needing to be used. There is much that is left unsaid, much implication, allowing the reader brief control & flashes of involvement.
There are few writers who can achieve this height with such grace, expertise & control. This is the first collection that I have read that explores how short stories can be an expression, an exploration of words, a hide & seek of happenings. I really cannot believe that Roll Up for the Arabian Derby has not been long listed or short listed for an award.
Flowers in a neglected field - By: John Masefield, 11 Jun 2008 Susan Wicks is a poet with an ear for language, & it showsin this prose collection. Several of the pieces are writtenin the first person, but they read as though the subject was speaking, rather than thinking.
Some stories here would not pass the "time honoured" tests of what makes a story, but maybe such old tests & definitions need to be thrown out. Life is not about beginnings, middles & ends, so why should art be? Sometimes we just get a brief picture of a life & then move on. We have to extend the story ourselves if we want to build the world that the character lives in. The reader can participatein the story if he wants to. Does this bring short stories closer to poetry than longer prose pieces can get?
It would be interesting to see what someone who does not know Susan Wick's work would make of the gender issuesin the collection. There are stories where the reader does not know the sex of the protagonist until the writer chooses to tell us. And sometimes we do not know at all. This makes the space available for the reader even greater.
Very few people write short stories now, & even fewer get them published. This is sad, as the form can be very effective. If your taste for short stories was dulled by "O" level English, try this collection.
