"Green Shoes Mean I Love You" is a collection of memoirs, essays, short fiction and poetry, as stated on the cover. Therefore it is ideal if you like your reading in bite-size chunks.
The opening memoirs are strong. The opening lines of each separate piece draw you in to want to read the rest straight away, e.g. "In 1979 my father waged war on the Mormons." The memoirs include amusing anecdotes and some moving pieces too.
Then there are the thinking pieces, or essays, covering things such as aspects of Seattle, the author being a Seattleite, and things people of the Generation X (which the author is) would have went through. This includes "The Seattle NO", the author's blog piece that can be found on the web, and which is mentioned in the blurb for this book. The essays on Seattle would be best appreciated by those familiar with America.
The short fiction pieces are next with each having the potential to be expanded into more full stories, so you might feel short-changed by them as you want more, and the collection finishes with some non-rhyming poetry, a couple of poems cleverly being related to each other.
The poem that finishes the book is called "Green Shoes Mean I Love You," and also lends it's name to the book, bringing the big reveal as to why exactly green shoes mean I love you right at the end, just as if the book were a novel.
So all in all a variety of things within the covers, some ok, some good and some excellent.
(I got this book through a Goodreads First Read competition. This review is my honest opinion of the book.)
Publication Date: 31 May 2014
Amazon UK link: Green Shoes Mean I Love You
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