Review: Quality Snacks

Title: Quality Snacks 

Author: Andy Mozina 

Synopsis: Driven by strange ambitions, bungled love, and a taste for – or abject fear of – physical danger, the characters in this collection enact the paradox in the concept of a quality snack: the dream of transmuting the mundane into something extraordinary. Andy Mozina depicts high-stakes performances to gratify both deep and superficial needs: A man experiencing a career crisis watches a 74-year-old great grandmother perform aerial acrobatics at the top of a swaying 110-foot pole. A troubled young man tries to end his father’s verbal harassment by successfully hunting a polar bear. Desperate to find a full-time job, a pizza deliveryman is fooled into a humiliating sexual demonstration by a couple at a Midway Motor Lodge. And in the title story, a flavor engineer at Frito-Lay tries to win his boss’s heart with his strategy to reposition Doritos from snack food to main course.

Review:

Quality Snacks is a collection of apparently random short stories that as a unit make an amazing creative world.

The narration is detailed and well taken care of. It took me some time to get into the narrative rhythm because I am not used to reading short stories. Though after I read the first 5 I really get into the story.

One of the things I liked the most were the surprises that where behind each short story. It brought suspense into the narrative. My favourite short story was Pelvis, it get stuck in my head even after I finished the book. I also enjoyed the Santa one, I was thrilled for reading an elf civil war. It was refreshing and funny.

Quality Snacks is the perfect mix of humor, fun and inner reflexions. A very suitable reading for fiction lovers!