I can't praise this collection of stories highly enough. Marly Swick is an artist with words and she paints masterful pictures through her stories. Highly recommended.

I am always excited when I discover a new writer who knocks me out, and Marly Swick definitely qualifies as one of them. Real, whole characters. Intriguing situations. Wry humor. Clarity of emotion and experience. A compelling voice. Resonant, moving endings. Short story perfection.

Paper Wings manages to maintain a unique, sweet, clear voice and vision. Another "fictional memoir" about being a child during the Kennedy assassination? "Oh, spare me!", right? Swick's book has an excellent, easy flow, and, although it's not a "can't put it down" book, you certainly don't want to put it down. Worth ordering though it seems to be currently out of print.

12 year old Suzanne Keller thinks everything is finally going right when her family moves into their new home. Her mother isn't gulping down aspirin or immobile with a migraine. She seems to turn into the mother she has always wanted. That's until the news of JFK's assassination rocks her world.

Suzanne's mother, Helen was obsessed by him, his family and all he stood for. Once again, she is irrational, nervous, chain smoking and chain reading, looking for an answer to the question mark of her life.

The family disintergrates around Suzanne as her mother tries to deal with the demons of her past and get a grip on the future.

I just finished this book and am still savoring its sweetness! Marly Swick is a new-found hero of mine.....she proves an incredible talent for letting you see through the eyes of a 12-year old child in this coming-of-age, touching and reminiscent novel. Her attention to detail is an important aspect of her writing and allowed me to relate entirely to this story of growing up in the 1960's. I found this book comforting and joyful, even in its "sadness", and that is a true testament to Ms. Swick's abilities!

When I first picked this book up, I thought it was just another easy read ~~ something quick and brainless to pass the time. I was not expecting good writing or a good story line ... and this book threw me for a change. I guess I shouldn't judge a book by its cover like I did with this one.

However, despite its good writing and plot, the story itself is brutal, hard, self-searching for truth and deals with a tough issue ... accidental death by shooting. Teddy accidentally shoots his baby sister, Trina, and his whole life turns upside down as well as his mom and stepdad's. And Swick deals with the issue of grieving, bitterness, anger, a mother's struggle to continue to love her son ... all in this compact book. She deals with the death from all angles and does a good job. You relate to everyone of the characters and you see something that makes the evening news with a closer perspective than you would normally.

I enjoyed this book much to my surprise, considering the grisly theme. It also isn't just a cheap thriller either. It's a book I would pass on for friends to read. It's much better than I thought it would be and I recommend it for anyone to read.

No matter what stage of life you are at when reading Evening News - this book will affect you. Marly Swick looks at the death of a child from every angle and speaks in all the right voices so that the reader can truly feel everyone's emotions - no one is right, no one is wrong but they are all learning to live with death in their own way.

Evening News begins with on eof the most memorable opening chapters I have read in a long time. 9 Year old Teddy and his best friend Eric are playing with Eric's father's gun. In an instant, Teddy's beloved baby sister Trina is gone and his whole world has turned upside down and inside out.

Teddy must deal with his mother, Giselle's and step-father, Dan's devestation as well as his own. He must live with the guilt and fear, Giselle must learn to grieve for Trinia and protect her son and Dan must learn to live and forgive. To make matters worse, Teddy's father wants Teddy to move back to Nebraska to live with him and heal.

Marly Swick handles all of these emotions like an artist and the reader feels equally as confused as the charaters - The novel takes the reader through the first few months and years after the accident so that the reader learns what toll the devestation takes on this family. Will they learn to surivive this together or will they have to fight their battles on their own. She is so deft at creating the feelings of these characters through words that every reader, no matter whether they have suffered a loss in their lives or not, will grieve for Trina and her family.

This is a fabulous novel - I can not wait to see aht Marly will write next. I highly recommend this book.

This book begins with one of the worst tragedies that can happen to a family--the accidental murder of one member by another. Before this occurred, nine year old Teddy lived with his mother Giselle, step-father Dan and 18 month old half-sister Trina as a happy family in California. After Teddy accidentally shoots and kills Trina with a neighbor's gun, the family struggles to overcome and retain what they once had. They soon realize that that is impossible, as Dan cannot forgive Teddy and Teddy cannot forgive himself.

What follows is each character's struggle to make sense of a senseless tragedy and heal. No one is given easy answers or convenient escape routes or resolutions.

Although the topic is disturbing, this is a rare realistic look at human tragedy and the ability to forgive and heal.

Move over, Evelyn Wood. Instead of speed reading text, Paul T. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger tell you how to speed read the personalities of those with whom you work and play. This book ably explains the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. With a little practice, you can quickly identify your own personality type and that of anyone you meet. If you are already familiar with the Myers-Briggs model, much of this book will be old news. If you aren't familiar with it, and if you want to learn how to "SpeedRead" people according to this theory, this book will benefit you. The authors go into great detail about the four temperaments and the sixteen personality types within them. We from getAbstract recommend this as a book for purposeful study. However, even if you only read it once, you will learn something about yourself or the people around you.

Move over, Evelyn Wood. Instead of speed reading text, Paul T. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger tell you how to speed read the personalities of those with whom you work and play. This book ably explains the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. With a little practice, you can quickly identify your own personality type and that of anyone you meet. If you are already familiar with the Myers-Briggs model, much of this book will be old news. If you aren't familiar with it, and if you want to learn how to "SpeedRead" people according to this theory, this book will benefit you. The authors go into great detail about the four temperaments and the sixteen personality types within them. We [...] recommend this as a book for purposeful study. However, even if you only read it once, you will learn something about yourself or the people around you.

I'm a nineteen year old student who's been interested in Myers-Briggs personality type for several years, and this is one of the most interesting and readable books there is. It's got the best, most accurate profiles of the 16 personality types that I've ever found. To respond to the previous review: I agree that the title of the book, and even the introduction make the book sound like it teaches manipulation. But it does not. Flip past the first few pages, and it will teach you to understand where other people are coming from. I've found personality typing really does help me to have more compassion and patience with people who are different from me. This book teaches some personality theory, but focuses more on putting it into practice. It's very understandable and I highly recommend it, especially for people who are looking for an introduction to personality types.

I'm not usually an avid reader of the short story format. I generally find that I'm not satisfied with the character and plot development that happens in such a brief space of words, despite a more condensed writing style and other techniques adopted by authors. In this collection of stories, however, Marly Swick has managed to write in a simple and straightforward, but convincing manner about people facing their own personal troubles.

Marly Swick has written an arresting collection of stories in "Monogamy." They are arresting not because of their magnificence or grandeur, but rather because of their simplicity and angularity; they have the attractiveness of weathered, split rock - gritty and appealing an a way that the reader may not be able to put their finger on - immediately or ever at all.

The stories read like raw slices from everyday life - like cross-sections, cut whole and lifted, quivering and warm, from the lives of the people about whom the stories are written. By definition, a short story is brief excursion into someone's life - not a whole story, not novelized, but pieces like amputated limbs. Swick's collection is reminiscent of those limbs in the respect that we find that just when a story is getting good or seems to be going somewhere, it ends abruptly. It is as though, running a hand down your leg, you find, shockingly, that there is nothing below your knee where you expected the rest of your leg to be.

That is not to say that these are not good stories. On the contrary, they are well written, and the same quality that applies to their truncated nature applies to their general feel and texture. They are not predictable; they catch the reader off guard, twisting of into unexplored regions and corridors of the mind. Most importantly, the characters don't behave as one would expect them to; they behave like real people, rather than characters in a book.

Although none of the stories is linked to each other in the sense that they are all different situations with different people and ideas, they are all bound by the common thread of monogamy; they are all loosely connected by this idea and others related to it. In fact, one of the stories, rather than concerning itself with monogamy specifically, focuses instead on the idea of polygamy - with some interesting results.

The stories are reminiscent of Alice Munro, in that they have ordinary people doing "ordinary" things - although how any one person defines "ordinary" is so relative to one person as to be almost meaningless to the population at large. The things that these characters do are so oridinary that occasionally they may seem quite bizarre to the reader - like viewing a bird through the wrong end of a telescope and wondering how it can look so small and far-off, and yet at the same time so perfectly correct.