Driven

A few months ago I took a writing workshop with Sarah Braunstein, author of The Sweet Relief of Missing Children. At the time, I hadn't read the book, and because the workshop was only a couple of days away, I satisfied my curiousity by reading her short story "Driven" (http://www.fivechapters.com/2011/driven/) on the Five Chapters website (a website I really enjoy and highly recommend for other stories as well).

I loved the story. The pace, the character development, the end (oh! the end!).

Eventually I got around to reading the novel, too. (The workshop, by the way, was fantastic. Braunstein is a generous and encouraging teacher.) The novel was beautifully written, and there were parts that took my breath away. But then, I didn't feel like the end was enough--it simply left too much unresolved for me. Maybe because I read the story first (which seems to have been taken more or less directly from the novel) and I so loved it, I was hoping for a few more threads to be tied up.

I'm very much looking forward to Braunstein's short story in an upcoming issue of Ploughshares.