Rating: 
Summary: Intriguing and thought provoking collection
Review: In Drinking Coffee Elsewhere ZZ Packer provides a varied, intriguing and thought provoking collection of stories. On the face of things, nothing particularly revelatory happens in this collection of eight short stories. And yet, each of these stories, chronicling bits and pieces of the African-American experience, is in fact extraordinary. While complex and detailed in their structure, these stories are in fact quote amorphous upon further reflection. These stories are open to a wide range of analysis and interpretation. One finds oneself pausing for a while between stories as one considers the implications and potentialities of the one just finished. For example, take the title story, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere." The title refers to the main character's coping strategy, namely pretending to be somewhere else when the pain she is enduring becomes too much. After Dina makes the dean's dubious watch list for naming a revolver as the inanimate object she'd most like to transform into during Yale freshman orientation, she becomes a sort of self-made outcast. When she meets Heather, a doughy fellow frosh who can't stop crying over a bad night with a new guy, Dina gradually learns to let her in and wonders if their relationship is something more than just platonic. Like all of Packer's stories, "Drinking Coffee Elsewhere" offers no hard and fast finale. Dina may or may not be gay. She may or may not be using her outcast status at Yale as a way of coping with her mother's death. And, she may or may not be the same protagonist, again a black loner named Dina, who alienates her roommates by eating the last slice of grapefruit in the later story, "Geese." My experience with short stories is that they are either predominantly cognitive or predominately emotive in nature. Reading this book is as much a cognitive as it is an emotive experience. Packer's style at times is almost journalistic in presentation. She gives us the "facts" as she sees them and lets the reader draw his/her own conclusions. Packer's characters in these stories are often, though not always, very smart. Many are struggling to rise above their circumstances, yet they feel trapped by things beyond their control: their parents, their faith and their jobs, and-to the extent they have any-their friends. Obviously, based on previous reviews, this is a collection people either love or dislike intensely. I liked it a lot and anxiously await Packers next effort.
Rating: 
Summary: it's missing something.
Review: Maybe I'm just too different from ZZ Packer to fully appreciate her book. But all the people in her stories are so different... and none of them really clicked (I kinda liked the little girl who ran away though). In fact, some of them seemed like unfair characterizations. The people weren't real - they're maybe what you'd guess someone like that might be like. Not well rounded enough to catch you and draw you in. Some of the stories were hard to get through, especially the first one. At least one of them didn't seem to have a point (although that's typical of short story collections). But again, I want to say.. maybe it's because I'm not enough like her. Maybe I can't fill in the blanks the way that someone who is like her can. Maybe you have to have some of these experiences in order figure these people out. If you're intrigued by the types of charcters she writes about, I'd encourage you to give it a try. I wouldn't, however, recommend it as the place to start if you are not.
Rating: 
Summary: Well done
Review: Not being much of a short-story reader, I hesitated to read this collection, but I'm glad I did. ZZ Packer has quite the talent for creating characters that just simply feel real. Any one of these stories could've been written novel-length if she'd been so inclined. "Brownies" and "Our Lady of Peace" were my two favorites.
Rating: 
Summary: overrated
Review: not that great. packer is not a great writer, she just nailed down a few details in the story to make it plausible but it has no real feeling, as in -- whatever "drinking coffee elsewhere" is supposed to mean -- it comes off as lame and sophmorish and only seems to hint at something she doesn't have the linguistic command to fully evoke. skip it for Kate Braverman or Darcy Stienke.
Rating:
Summary: wasn't impressed
Review: Obviously, I'm in the minority with the reviewers here. A couple of the stories were impressive - the first in particular. But they ended in a confusing place, with not much resolved that I could see. The minor characters weren't developed enough to make it clear why they did what they did, and had sudden changes of heart. Like in the first, it was never clear why Daphne decided to be nice to the narrator - sure, she was not the kind of girl to join in bullying, but why did she choose then to start supporting the narrator? It just was not clear. Also, there was not enough information about the narrator - why she got picked on apart from being quiet? Considering all the accolades showered on the author, though, I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I missed something in the book. I picked up the book because I was hoping to learn more about a culture that I have never experienced firsthand. But the flatness of the characters kept me from doing this. They could have almost been any color, even Caucasian, apart from the narrators of each story, that is.
Rating:
Summary: A non-p.c. review
Review: Packer is a talented first-time writer. However, I found her reverse racism pretty hard to stomach. If the tables were turned and a white writer was writing this way about blacks -- and I'm talking about contemporary writers, not writers in the past when racism was the norm -- a publisher would not have touched this book with a ten-foot pole.
Rating: 
Summary: Moving and Memorable
Review: People tend to have enough to read, so I rarely foist new things on my friends to add to their pile. But I've made repeated exceptions for ZZ Packer since discovering the title story of this collection several years ago, which sent me scurrying to the library to find whatever else she had written. These emotionally complex and gutwrenching stories showcase a variety of African-American characters struggling to break free of their mental prisons, with realistically mixed results. Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, race is a context but "on the lower frequencies" (and not so lower ones) the characters speak for all of us. Plus the stories are simply good reads - events move fast and the tension rarely lets up until the finish. Friends of the extraordinary, give this book a read!
Rating:
Summary: Search for Belonging and Identity Told with Wisdom and Humor
Review: Please be clear: these are fun stories to read, not simply good literary stories that people consume as if they were eating their vegetables. Reminding me of Flannery O'Conner and Lorrie Moore, these stories are tied together by the theme of belonging. In the opening story, for example, Brownies, the African American girls, members of the Brownies, want to avenge the white girl Brownie members at a campsite not so much because they feel they have been genuinely offended or because they feel the need to avenge anyone but because they need a rite of passage that will test their loyalty to each other. In the second story, Every Tongue Shall Confess, a skinny, somewhat homely nurse does everything she can to be a good Christian: she sings in the choir, she witnesses, she submits to the church deacons' patriarchal rules, she lives a life of chastity . . . yet for all her good works, she remains a misfit, a lonely outsider who wonders if there is any power in her life of piety and she begins to wonder, watching the hypocrites in her church, if she will ever find a sense of belonging. In the third story, both tragic and funny, Our Lady of Peace, a young woman who is in desperate in need of job resorts to teaching high school English at a tough inner city school in Baltimore and she suffers incredible isolation and burnout as she sinks further and further in her failure to reach her students to the point that she surrenders, however temporarily, to the powers of nihilism. All these stories point to the outsider looking for a place to belong is a common theme in these stories, which are told with complexity, humanity, irony, and deep humor. These wonderful stories have that quality that demands that they be reread, a sign of the highest literary art.
Rating:
Summary: Drinking coffee with ZZ Packer
Review: The collection by ZZ Packer opened my eyes and heart. A 4 out of 5 for me. Now a 5, in retrospective inquiry. Try "Brownies" and "The Ant of the Self", if one hasn't had the opportunity to read the entire volume. The only reason I did not give this slim volume a 5/5 initially is because I found three of the stories infringed on my comfort zone, not that the writing was inferior, and I rate strictly on personal enjoyment. Revisiting was easier. When I feel the need to close a book, it is usually not because of lack of authorial skill, but rather that I need to peek out from under my own armpit and take a better look, without sniffing the snake in the woodpile. I loved this book, and found it disturbingly wonderful. That may be a very good thing. Not one who purchases short story collections often, I'm glad that I did.. Actually, Packer reminds me of Alice Adams and Lorrie Moore in style, with a whole bunch of Alice Walker's thoughts from Grange Copeland thrown in for good measure. ZZ Packer's Drinking Coffee Elsewhere edifies existance.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: The New York Times used the word "superb" in describing this story collection, and it seems completely justified. ZZ Packer has a largeness of spirit, an intellectual curiosity and subtlety, and a flair for marvelous dialogue to go with her brilliant storytelling. I've clipped several of these stories from The New Yorker or Harper's, and am so happy to finally have them in book form. If I were going to think of the writer these stories remind me of most, it would be Chekhov, though ZZ Packer is actually too distinctive in style and subject matter to be compared to anyone else. But, like Chekhov's, these stories have a moral dimension which has nothing to do with primness and everything to do with a sense of the grave consequences of our decisions, even when we're trying to do our best. Also the experience of reading these is a little like that of reading Chekhov's stories; it is impossible to guess where you are going next -- the turns in each story are both surprising and, in retrospect, absolutely convincing. These stories take huge risks, and they earn them. One question I hear a lot these days is, "what is this writer loyal to?" ZZ Packer is loyal to a deep, beautiful, sometimes painful honesty. She knows how human beings behave, and she lets us experience that knowledge, but, like Chekhov, she has too much generosity and wisdom to condemn the people she describes. She knows exactly how it is that we sometimes find ourselves so far from home, in more ways than one. How can these stories be so truthful and such a pleasure to read? Among all these beautiful stories, it's hard to pick out any one passage to show the grace, compression, readability, and fierce wit of the writing, but here is one of my favorites from the title story, where an older narrator describes her younger self locked in a struggle with the mostly privileged, mostly white world of Yale. This is from her reaction to the inane ice-breaking games at Orientation, when each person is asked to describe themselves as an object (the narrator has already been -- maddeningly, irrelevantly -- labeled by a counselor during a previous game): "When it was my turn I said, "My name is Dina, and if I had to be any object, I guess I'd be a revolver." The sunlight dulled as if on cue. Clouds passed rapidly overhead, presaging rain. I don't know why I said it. Until that moment I'd been good in all the ways were meant to matter. I was an honor roll student -- though I'd learned long ago not to mention it in the part of Baltimore where I lived. Suddenly I was hard-bitten and recalcitrant, the kind of kid who took pleasure in sticking pins into cats; the kind who chased down smart kids to spray them with Mace." If one of the purposes of real literature is to enlarge our ability to feel compassion for ourselves and others, then these stories do that. This may be her first book, but it's already clear that ZZ Packer is a great writer. These stories add to the richness of the world.
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