Love Will Make You Drink and  Gamble, Stay Out all Night

By Shelly Lowenkopf

ISBN# 9780983632986

Brought to you by OBS reviewer Kim

Synopsis:

Love Will Make You Drink and Gamble, Stay Out Late at Night” brings a number of Shelly Lowenkopf’s previously published short stories together in a single volume. Lowenkopf is best known as a master instructor of fiction writing and a book editor. He taught for over thirty years at the University of Southern California, and now at the noted College of Creative Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. All the while, he’s been publishing these short gems. All the stories revolve around life in Santa Barbara, the oceanside city north of Los Angeles, where people go after they’ve burned out in San Francisco and L.A. But there’s no safe haven anywhere. Interwoven into Santa Barbara’s picturesque setting, the people in these twelve stories reveal what their hearts and souls encounter in relationships. Their misreadings, mistakes, and misadventures bare what happens to people who love another.

“Shelly Lowenkopf is a gifted, humane story-teller,” says author Aram Saroyan (Rancho Mirage).

“‘Love Will Make You Drink and Gamble, Stay Out Late at Night’ is a delight.”

Review:

I started to give this a 3 star rating because a couple of the stories where confusing and I, myself, couldn’t make heads or tails of them even after reading them again. But because of the few that where really good and do deseve a 5 I decided to give this a 4.

Shelly has introduced his collection of short stories in this book and each one is different and unique. The stories are about love, the differences of love and how we perceive ourselves and others and how they perceive us and themselves.

You have all kinds of love, you have the marrying kind, the love of a pet, the love of friends and the love of what you do in life. They come to you in so many different ways and times and you have to figure out what you want and what you want to do with it.

There also are the ways and whys and hows to end such said relationships. In each story you have the beginning, middle and the ends and sometimes you get to have a do-over.

Depending on the person reading the collection of these stories is how the outcome will be seen to them. The way I saw it and read it will be different then what a new reader will read it and draw their own conclusions. This is a clever way of putting short stories together into one book because you have something for each reader and they will find something to enjoy in this collection. A satisfying book for all readers of any kind that like relationships and the complications of them thrown in.

My favorite story, Coming to Terms, you can find what you are looking for and needing in the weirdiest places and times but you have to be open to you to it and you have to take the good with the bad.

So this book just might make you drink, gamble and staying up all night. One of the few books today that has something for everyone.

*OBS would like to thank the author and Virtual Author Book Tours for supplying a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review as part of their ongoing blog tour*