Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dreams and unusual realities , 25 Nov 2006
Gaiman is a writer of rich and vivid imagination. This collection of short stories, short fiction and poems demonstrate his talent on every page. Hovering between reality and fantasy he has created a distinctive world peopled with ordinary people, young and old, who meet up with ghosts, zombies and other creatures. With great skill and ease Gaiman creates credible characters and compelling scenarios.
Some "fragile things" describe dreams, others move effortlessly from actuality to visions of otherworldliness often taking the reader by surprise. Most of the stories in this collection have a serious, some a macabre, side to them. At the same time, humour and irony are natural companions. There is the young boy, ignored by his family and peers, who finally meets a friend and companion as he runs away to start a new life. A Harlequin character reinvents himself with every real life Valentine heart he sends to an object of his desire. Storytelling is a theme for many of the characters in the collection. In "October in the Chair" we listen in as every month competes for the best story that the others haven't heard before. Many of the stories were inspired by other writers and friends and fiction pieces were written for their magazines or anthologies.
While each of the stories has been published previously, it is a treat to have them collected in one volume. Every piece stands by itself, yet, when read contiguously each adds elements to a whole creating for the reader a complex tapestry of imaginary lives. Anybody who has read other Gaiman books will welcome his volume. For newcomers, Fragile Things is a great introduction to his work. [Friederike Knabe]
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An interesting mix that's easy to read, 26 Jun 2007
Of the collection, I'd already read How To Speak To Girls At Parties and A Study In Emerald before and of the two, I think that A Study In Emerald is the stronger story. For those who don't know, A Study In Emerald is a hybrid of the Sherlock Holmes stories and Locecraft's Call of Cthulu, set in an alternative world where the Old Ones rule over man and one of their number has been murdered. Gaiman nails the tone and the narrative voice and the story itself is fascinating. How To Speak To Girls At Parties, by contrast, reads like fluff - it's amusing but the ending is weak.
With those stories that were new to me, I particularly enjoyed The Problem Of Susan, which looks at what happened to the fourth Pevensie sibling after her brothers and sister were permanently taken to Narnia. Gaiman makes Narnia a much darker place and subverts the antagonism between Aslan and the White Witch and whilst the reporter is a little forced at times, Susan herself is very believable. Harlequin Valentine is an entertaining take on the relationship between Harlequin and Columbine, with a neat twist at the end that makes you feel sorry for the trickster. Sunbird, a story that Gaiman wrote as a present for his daughter, Holly, is an amusing look at an epicuran society in their search for the ultimate gastronomic experience. Gaiman uses a stylised narrative that should jar, but doesn't and again, it has a very neat ending.
I didn't particularly enjoy Diseasemaker's Croup (the style's fine and I can see what he's doing with it, but it just didn't grab me) or Pages From A Journal Found In A Shoebox In A Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma and Louisville, Kentucky (which is too much of a stream of consciousness story that again, didn't grab me). I also felt that October In The Chair, a story that Gaiman says in his introduction was originally intended to be part of another collection, felt unfulfilling and whilst that's partly to do with the decidely open ending, it's also because you feel that there's a backstory there that needs to be developed further.
The collection finishes with a novella, a sort of follow-on to Gaiman's excellent novel, American Gods, in which Shadow has travelled to a remote part of Scotland, where he is invited to work as a bodyguard to an unusual party for one weekend. Whilst I think that the central hook of the story is a little contrived, Gaiman weaves in Norse legend with contemporary life in a way that carries the reader along nicely and his portrayal of Grendel is quite heartbreaking. It also made me want to see a full length sequel to American Gods as I think that Shadow is a fascinating and troubled character and one with more tales to tell.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Forgettable - try Smoke and Mirrors instead, 25 Sep 2007
I'm a big fan of Neil Gaiman's books so I had high expectations of another short story collection but this book left me completely cold. I particularly loved Smoke and Mirrors. Best part of a year after reading it so many of the stories still stick in my head: the wedding present, the cat, the playboy girl, the angels, snow white, the hollywood hotel, the troll and the genius 100 word santa story in particular. It is two weeks since I finished Fragile Things and I'm struggling to remember a distinct story out of it. Only the Shadow novella stands out, and then only because of its complete failure to repeat the great trick from American Gods of making the absurd believable.
Don't get me wrong, its still Neil Gaiman so it is well written with some great lines and imagination and there are a lot of worse ways of passing a few hours but I couldn't find any of the fire and bite and connection I got from Smoke and Mirrors. The stories seemed much more similar to each other and the themes of disappearances and the ghosts/gods/monsters among us never seemed to let up to give some variety or surprise at the next one.
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