I really wanted to love this more. First off, the cover art is what did it for me. I mean look at it, it’s so beautiful and striking. The stories www a hit or miss. I think the last story, “In a Better Place” was my personal favorite. Some of the stories started off good, but quickly became far-fetched and predictable. Also there was not much variety. A lot of the stories felt interchangeable and similar. I love reading short story collections, but variety is the key ingredient. I think the writing style is quirky and fun, but I wanted more depth and variety.

A collection of stories that are masterfully woven together-each story tells an amazing tale independently but weaving the characters together is a stroke of genius.

Whew this book was something else interesting to say the least especially when the main character is going from bed to bed to bed, meant to meant to men looking for love and all around places, it was very interesting and it has very much high potential for Readers

Well written complex characters in this collection of interconnected short stories - and yet most of them did not work for me (I just simply need a character I can root for and I had very few of those here)

I really enjoyed the first and last story - and the way some of the characters were filled in throughout - but I just think this was not the collection for me!

Thanks so much to Helen Schuman and NetGalley for a chance to read this in exchange for an honest review. 2.5 stars.

I recently had a small French sort of appetizer that was like eating a flaky savory jewel, and I wanted to both slowly prolong and understand the flavor episode of what I was eating, and immediately have another and then another. Reading the entwined stories of Helen Schulman's Fools for Love was a similar experience.
There is a forbidden love between a string of poems, an observant young rabbi and a single mother; an admissions officer who finds a doppelganger applicant resembling a long dead boy who spurned her; a terrifyingly self-aware highly critical baby, a sozzled doctor who forces himself to take the longest of long detours home, and a spate of serial divorces, hookups, breakups, deaths, and infidelities. The boundaries are wavy and a mixture of unrelenting undeterred lust mixed with deadpan humor. Schulman has a perfect sense of when to end each piece, which also don’t always end. Main and then background characters flit in and out of these narratives like fireflies, sometimes like moths. And the bigger questions on the nature of desire are there too, and will hang around for quite a while. This is the book you want to have sitting across from you at a favorite café after you’ve both loosened up and had a few drinks and your literary companion starts to open pages and spill spicy, mesmerizing stories. They are bittersweet, funny, a little eerie and flawless. Why would you ever want to leave?