Short Story Review: 'The Doll's House' by Lisa Unger & 'The Lover' by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

 As I recently read two short stories for Amazon Original Stories, I thought it would be worth combining them into a single review, especially as my issues with the one were resolved neatly in the other. Thanks to NetGalley and Amazon Original Stories for providing me with a copy of these stories in exchange for an honest review. Let's begin!

The Doll's House by Lisa Unger

Pub. Date: 12/09/2024
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories

A widowed mother, ready to give love another chance, moves into her fiancé’s old family home with her teenage daughter. But as they try to build a future together, the past refuses to let go in this haunting short story from New York Times bestselling author Lisa Unger.

When Jules first meets the handsome artist Kirin, she’s still mourning her husband’s death, but a fairytale romance soon sweeps her off her feet. Now she and her daughter Scout are moving out of the city and into Kirin’s once-lonely mansion. He’s thoughtfully updated and adapted the home to match their personalities. But Scout is determined to keep her father’s memory alive by rejecting the new life her mother and Kirin have spun for her.

Scout’s sullenness begins to fade, though, when she finds a beautiful handmade doll in one of the many empty rooms in the house. Kirin says that the doll belonged to his late sister and he’d like Scout to have it. Scout’s hopeful for a connection over their shared grief, but as she grows more curious about Kirin’s sister, she can’t escape the feeling that a danger lurks in the house…and its gaze is fixed on her mother.

It is not impossible to write a gripping, thrilling short story, see everything short ever written by Daphne du Maurier or Shirley Jackson. It is a challenge, however, to build up characters, arcs, inciting incidents, etc. over a short story in a way that makes the reader commit to it the way they would with a full novel. I really enjoyed the premise of Lisa Unger's The Doll's House, with Jules trying to move on from the death of her husband and Scout, her daughter, dealing with the loss of a parent and now change. The story is also told through their dual perspectives. There is a lot of emotional intensity to mine there, and Kirin as the "too good to be true" new partner could also work really well, especially with the combination of his work and the new house. Added to that is the history of Kirin's sister. This, however, is a lot for a short story. It's almost as if a full-length novel was trimmed into a short story and as a consequence, all subtlety or nuance was lost. The story begins with Jules and Scout moving into Kirin's house and then, from there, I don't think more than a week passes, if even that. The developments that take place, especially in Kirin's character and Scout's was too quick for me to be able to suspend my disbelief. On top of that, there were a lot of elements that felt a little over-the-top, although I probably would have accepted them in a novel where they had more time to be established. For me, The Doll's House just simply wanted to do too much all at once. I probably would have enjoyed it more if either it had been either down, significantly, by focusing on just one perspective for example, or stretching the time period it covered, so that it doesn't all feel quite as sudden.

As such, I'd give this story 2 stars.

The Lover by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Pub. Date: 01/11/2024
Publisher: Amazon Original Stories

During a brutal winter, a young woman longing for love finds more than she expected in the woods, in this wickedly sensuous short story by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

Judith knows her sister, Alice, is the pretty one—but that doesn’t stop her from wishing for love. When a handsome and gentlemanly hunter appears in their village, seeking lodging from the cold, she believes her lover has finally arrived. He does, indeed, choose to stay—but as Alice’s husband, not her own. When another stranger comes out of the woods, looking every bit a vagrant, he offers Judith something mysterious and enticingly strange. Against reason and decency, she welcomes both men into her life, in different ways. As forbidden longings ensnare each of them, an unrelenting winter storm and an evasive wolf on the prowl have everyone on edge…and ravenous. By spring thaw, will any of their hungers be satisfied?

In contrast to The Doll's Story, The Lover by Silvia Moreno-Garcia knows how to take a simple story and spin it into something luscious and dramatic. We have lovely tension from the start, with the unlucky younger sister matched against the beautiful older one, the village surrounded by woods, a prophecy of a stranger, and dark and mysterious men. The Lover is a fairy tale and something of a coming-of-age story, with Judith figuring out her desires and her destiny. A fairy tale-like short story doesn't give you a whole lot of space for character development either, but Moreno-Garcia lets enough time pass throughout the story to allow for growth to take place. Judith grows in awareness of herself, she struggles with how her life has taken shape, and when she makes a choice in the end, you can see how she got there from who she was at the beginning. I've read a few books by Silvia Moreno-Garcia now and you'll find the same Gothic atmosphere here, if in a condensed form. It is also quite a sensual story, highlighting this idea of desire as a guiding force. I would have loved to read more, but I guess I'll just have to pick up her next book.

I'd give this story 4 stars!