Rating: 
Summary: Short stories that read like a novel
Review: I have a hard time reading short stories sometimes, but these were excellent. The first one, which titles the book, is almost a novella, very well crafted. With a murder at the center of the story, you read about how this death has affected different characters, and their take on it. My second favorite story is My Mother's Dream, a very vivid account of family dynamics at a time of loss and happiness. Each one of these stories left me satisfied, with a sense of completion, and that is something i often miss when reading short stories. I highly recommend this excellent work by Alice Munro.
Rating:
Summary: Short stories that read like a novel
Review: I have a hard time reading short stories sometimes, but these were excellent. The first one, which titles the book, is almost a novella, very well crafted. With a murder at the center of the story, you read about how this death has affected different characters, and their take on it. My second favorite story is My Mother's Dream, a very vivid account of family dynamics at a time of loss and happiness. Each one of these stories left me satisfied, with a sense of completion, and that is something i often miss when reading short stories. I highly recommend this excellent work by Alice Munro.
Rating: 
Summary: genius
Review: I have been reading Munro's stories for years and even the profound admiration I had for her work could not prepare me for the force of this collection. It is literally impossible to find a better book. Each one of Munro's stories is worth hundreds of lesser works. The prose is gorgeous, the vision expansive yet percise and humane. Read, "Save the Reaper" last. It is a reworking of American fable and Flannery O'Connor that shows Munro has surpassed even that great American writer.
Rating:
Summary: A real treasure
Review: I loved this book. It really makes you think about the underlying motives and loyalties that exist in people. Alice Munro examines the everyday sort of person who must make certain choices and live with it. In reading this book I found myself asking questions and feeling slightly disturbed by my lack of certainty on many issues this book addresses. I love the way she uses language and her use of detail is superb. It will make you think and wonder and imagine all at the same time. What a wonderful writer she is!
Rating: 
Summary: Just so so
Review: I picked up this book from an airport bookstore. I am a regular reader of short novels published on New Yorker and seems most stories in this book were published there, according to the introduction. I have to admit that I still could not understand why Ms. Munro is such a big figure in North America's modern literature world. The stories are full of too many pieces of ordinariness and dullness, and make you feel the heaviness of your life. Her stories makes you feel like, "Why do I have to read in words about some DULL things I've seen/experienced in my life?" By the way, I've lived in eastern Canada for 9 years and have very warm feeling towards that region. And her writing is also so plain and REGULAR! (I love Peter Mayle's style, by the way, which makes you appreciate English as a language so much.) Perhaps this has nothing to do with Ms. Munro but my personal reading preferences.
Rating: 
Summary: 2/8 make the book worth reading
Review: In Munro's Love Of A Good Woman 8 stories set in British Columbia or Ontario involve secrets and choices. Of these 8, only 2 are good. "Save The Reaper" and "My Mother's Dream" are the only two stories that have a plot! You know plot? Conflict + Resolution? The other six are just story fragments, offering a smidgen of conflict (someone isn't happy) and smidgen of resolution (a decision is made with no impetus whatsoever put on the results). Yawn. When the conflict is this vague, it does not lend itself well to a short story format. To resolve such character-driven conflicts as these, the stories need room to breathe. Instead these short stories avoid happy and inevitably sit-comish endings or pessimistic endings and are left with only one other option: no ending at all. Maybe this is supposed to be presented as clever or provocative but in my mind it was frustrating. If only they were expanded into individual novels. Who can't come up with conflicts and leave them unresolved? However, Alice Munro's unpretentious dialogue and revealing characters are intriguing and when she uses them in actual complete stories, such as Reaper and Dream, near- perfection is achieved. The only reason I say "near" is because of a tiny (but huge) disjointed sentence in Reaper. As the grandmother character finds herself out of one perilous situation and into another; sitting next to a prostitute with her grandchildren in the back seat of her car, Munro's preoccupation with sex thrusts the reader back into reality. Momentarily ruining the fantasy. Up to that point, I found my heart beating synchronously with the grandmother- and when the prostitute touches the grandmother's thigh I found myself wondering if things could get any worse. But then I was jarred out of the story altogether. The grandmother was slightly awakened and turned on by the prostitute! Yeah, right! However, I ended up liking the story so much that I'm making an effort to ignore that line (obviously with little success so far). My Mother's Dream at the end was complete perfection (a good note to end on). It had a fully realized plot and no absurd sexual remark. If only the rest of the book was that good.
Rating:
Summary: Alice Munro's idea of a "good woman" may surprise you.
Review: In the title story of this collection, Enid, the self-sacrificing practical nurse, is transformed into someone else after she has the sickly and evil Mrs. Quinn as a patient before Mrs. Quinn dies. Without warning, Mrs. Quinn confesses conspiring with her husband to conceal a murder.Up to then, Enid thought of Rupert Quinn as a good man and devoted husband. Does "the love of a good woman" have the power of redemption:? Read the story to get Alice Munro's always astonishing perspective on the subject of goodness. In another fine story from this collection, "Before the Change", a young woman uses an abortion to test her father and her lover and they both come up short. In "Jakarta", my personal favorite, Sonje is such a good woman that she takes on the care of her lover's blind mother while Cottar continues a traveling, leftist journalist. But Sonje is not a fool though she may be a saint as her old friend Kent discovers. The collection contains such thought-provoking studies that it could influence the way you live your life.
Rating:
Summary: Not My Cup of Tea
Review: It has to admitted right up front that this is not a book I would ever have chosen to read on my own. However, as it was a selection for our bookgroup, I plowed in, and unlike many others in the group, finished it. Now, I'm sure that there is a demographic somewhere, for whom these eight stories really resonate and connect with -- but it sure isn't me. Set in the mid-1940s through the 1980s, the stories (five of which were first published in The New Yorker) take place in Munro's own milieu: Ontario and and British Columbia.
In general, they are about everyday life and the quiet desperate struggles that go on in ordinary lives, and are thematically bound by a sense of disappointment. Indeed, this is not a book to give to the newly affianced, filled as it is with dissolving marriages and forlorn women (good luck finding a positive male character anywhere in the pages). Repeatedly in these stories, the reader is confronted with women whose lives have not evolved the way they had expected or desired. Now, this is certainly a truth in life, but the stories all start to run together after a while. And when there is an incident that stands out, it feels unbelievable. For example, one story climaxes with a girl getting set on fire, another has a moment where a grandmother feels a sexual frisson when touched on the leg by a young woman, another has a daughter unwittingly talking to her father's corpse, another has a loving mother abandon her children, and so on. In each case, a tale of the problems of ordinary life is suddenly turned into melodrama with a jarring change of pace.
Certainly Munro is a skilled craftswoman, her prose is clearly labored over with great care and precision, but that only gets you so far. None of the characters are particularly interesting or compelling, and one is hard-pressed to care about their respective situations. There's a wan fatalism holding them all down, and that makes for gloomy reading. It might be that coming across them over time in The New Yorker, they'd feel a little more individual, but when collected, it feels like a one note concert. It should be noted that the title story is a bit different, much longer and much more scattered in style, it's also much more interesting. The last story is also stands out, as it is the only one that offers a sense of hope or happiness, which is probably why it was placed at the end of the book. So, while Munro does have a dab hand at description, the lack of interesting people in the stories and the uniformity of tone leave me unlikely to recommend this collection to anyone I know.
Rating:
Summary: Just right
Review: Munro's tone and style have only improved with time. The Love of a Good Woman has depth and insight the mark the author's rare voice. A true delight to read, filled with pathos and moments that will cause the reader to smile softly, thinking, "Yes, I know exactly how that feels." Worth the price and for many, will be a beloved part of a personal library; it stands repeated readings.
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful and Riveting
Review: This book is wonderful. Munro packs more into a few pages than most authors get into a full length novel. Great storytelling and compelling insight. Readers may also be interested in Fried Calamari, another book that provides interesting insight into a woman's psyche.
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