Hanks proves he's a talented storyteller, but most of the story lines seemed common place.
Summary:
A short story collection of sixteen fictional tales. Some characters have recurring stories throughout, like a columnist's writings on the good old days mixing with the modern age or a group of friends urging each other to scuba dive, or achieve a bowling record, or go to the moon. Most others feature one hit wonders like a struggling actress in New York, a teenage son surfing with his dad, an immigrant smuggling a friend into the States, or a ten-year-old spending a weekend with his mom. But all include a typewriter somewhere in their story.
Verdict: 4/10
Hanks has always had a way of putting his audience into the main character's shoes, whether it's a divorcee mom, a teenage boy, or a middle-aged veteran. And he sets his scenes very well, using just the right level of description. My issue wasn't with the writing itself - I just got bored. Instead of enjoying the narrative, the main focus was conveying some deep (often elusive) meaning in every story.
Maybe short story collections aren't for me. Don't get me wrong, I love the occasional novella or narrative article. But jumping between more than a dozen settings and characters, even spread out over the course of a few month, was too much.
Some of these just didn't make sense - like the one where the recurring friend group builds their own rocket and goes to space, or the audio play where the Olympic businessman goes undercover to reinvigorate an elderly couple's business. While most were rooted in the real world, a couple of them suspended reality without advance notice.
Playing with the impossible really only worked in the story about time-travel vacations, and even that took some adjusting to believe. It only worked because you were seeing a man fall in love with the past, literally, and the dangers of that. It was the longest and most complex of the stories, but it was probably one of my favorites.
Besides that one, the most worthwhile stories for me personally were the second one featuring Christmas with a veteran, the one about a girl buying a typewriter for the first time, and any of the snappy "Our Town Today" columns. By in large, the others were fairly forgettable. It wasn't a bad collection, but it didn't especially stand out. I'm not likely to revisit.
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