Cross Eyed by Sarah Allen.

Although she sells this book as a collection of short stories, I think it should be billed as a collection of vignettes. 

With that in mind, I should start this by specifying that I absolutely love a good vignette! It is, to me at least, one of the least complicated, but most difficult forms of story telling. It requires you to give a snapshot of your characters life, or lives. But you can't tell their life story, nor all that much background; just enough information to make the story work, and therein lies the difficulty. If you give too much information, you overshadow the vignette and make it seem like an incomplete short story. If you don't give enough information, it comes off as a random thought, unconnected and useless to anything. It truly is an art form, but it is not very complex.

Keeping that in mind, Cross Eyed, by Sarah Allen, is a wonderfully entertaining exploration of the vignette. She has mastered this art form, and it shows in every paragraph. 

The stories range from a young girls problems with society and fitting in, to love found and love lost, family and neighbors...and an imaginary dog(which was my favorite of them all). 

Each tale is spun with a captivating prose that draws you in, and keeps you reading on. The usual things I look for are character development, plot, originality, and writing-she hit the mark on all of these. 

Now, obviously, with such short tales, one is inclined to believe she would have a hard time getting the character developed, but then one would be wrong. I feel like every character in the collection was well developed, and I worried for each of them. At the same time, I feel like each character was left on good terms. I would like to see more of a few of them, but for the sake of the vignette, I was content with where each tale ended. 

I discovered Sarah Allen on Google plus, and I am glad I did. I got this eBook when it was free, but I would gladly buy it. I would definitely recommend this collection to anyone who would love to be absorbed in a book for about an hour and who wants a bevy of tales to think about afterwards. These tales will stick with me for a little while, and if Ms.(or Mrs.?) Allen can accomplish so much with such a limited medium, I can't wait to read one her novels. I hope she gets published soon. Good luck to you, Sarah, I'll be anxiously awaiting your next work.