I initially read the titular short story last spring because I wanted to have read it before seeing the movie based on it, and I enjoyed it quite a bit but it lacked something of the knockout punch for me. This fall, after seeing the movie, I reread the short story and then the full collection of twelve stories, and they absolutely floored me. They are all in their own way the most beautifully New England stories, whether they're set in the 21st century or hundreds of years earlier, and the structure of the book and the way pairs of the stories are linked across time, either in terms of location or thematically or because of artifacts that exist in multiple times, deepens the impact of each individual story. The specificity of the worlds and the people within them will stay with me for a long, long time.
Grade: A
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