Bits of You & Pieces of Me
by Kimberly Kinrade
Copyright © February 2011
ISBN 9780615446950
$8.99 Paperback
$2.99 Kindle
120 Pages
Kimberly Kinrade and I have something in common. We both write to free ourselves “from the tyranny of my words” as she says in a small entry in the beginning of her anthology, Bits of You & Pieces of Me. I shook my head in agreement when I read that. Her book is a collection of short stories, journal essays, and poems – a well organized file of information from deep within the mind of a writer. While I do enjoy reading such collections from indie authors, it is often hard to make a connection with any one piece since they are just a few pages.
Most of her characters in her short stories remain nameless, so it’s very easy for the reader to assume the author may be talking about herself. If that is the case, then the book takes on the persona of a personal memoir for both the author and the reader and the “pieces of me” are shocking at times and definitely dwell past the surface letting us get a glimpse of who this author really is. If I am wrong, then these characters that have taken shape and form in Miss Kinrade’s mind, only to be given life on paper, demand center stage and I would like to see them panned out into longer pieces of fiction.
In one piece called “A Writer’s Mind,” the author even admits, I can have brilliant ideas, I may even be able to give voice to them, but can I bring them to the page and maintain the integrity of the thought? That’s the greatest challenge. And the greatest joy.
Again, a statement I completely agree with as long as you integrate your reader. At times, I thought Miss Kinrade had forgotten about the reader, or only scratched that surface I mentioned earlier. On the page, she “tells” us what’s going on instead of “showing” us so we are often left out of the picture. Sure, she lived it, she saw it, she said it, so the author has the advantage here of knowing what is going on. It is an even greater challenge to be able to show the reader that joy you have, to paint a beautiful picture using only words, only black and white. While we may want to stay true to our essays or journal entries, we sometimes still have to paint a picture.
As for the poetry, a well read person will easily catch on to some of what has inspired Miss Kinrade while she composed these essays and poems. With pieces called “Till Death Do Us Part” and “Death Be Not Proud,” they mirror pieces we have seen before, but there is no plagiarism here. Only the thought that you might have read that somewhere before. So, unfortunately for me, some of the poems lacked originality. There is anger, sadness, desire, love, all the qualities of poetry we’ve read before that have become almost as cliché as the titles themselves.
My favorite piece is called “All I Ever Needed to Learn…” in which an unnamed person, possibly the author, contemplates how maybe she actually didn’t learn everything she needed to know in kindergarten. She recalls her yearning for knowledge and is proud that she now sees that same yearning in her own children. It is these life lessons no teacher can teach us. The same can be said for talent. A teacher can teach us the techniques of writing, but the creativity and art of it is often natural or learned from experience. Miss Kinrade should be pleased as I can see both technique and creativity here.
At 120 pages, Bits of You & Pieces of Me is a quick read. Most of the poems are less than a dozen or so lines long. I enjoyed the moments spent with Miss Kinrade, the pieces that she revealed to me. But I would have liked to have seen a few bits more. A page in the back advertises a work of fiction due out later this year, The Reluctant Familiar: Book 1 of The Magicked Series. I believe it may hold more promise for this author in being a longer developed piece, and I personally look forward to reading it. As for her freshman effort, the bits and pieces make up a decent picture as a whole that many anthology lovers will appreciate, but it left me wanting more in the end.
