Living Large

As a fan of short story anthologies, I am always on the look out for new titles to enjoy. Living Large from Signet was a nice treat for my short story addiction. The contemporary romance anthology features four stories about plus sized women of color. The heroines were refreshingly confident about their size and it was a great to read about women who were not size 6.

In addition to the size of the heroines, the stories in the anthology shared a couple of other characteristics that kept me engaged. The first was the age range of the heroines. The youngest was 28-year-old Monica Jones in Francis Ray’s Strictly Business. The oldest was 52 year old Elizabeth Howell from Donna Hill’s Surprise!. The second trait I found really appealing was the fact that none of the couples in the stories were suspended in “romantic limbo” – that state where neither the hero nor the heroine have anyone else in their lives that they interact with on a regular basis. In every story in the anthology the characters had family, friends, co-workers, children, and social obligations. As much as I enjoy the brooding alpha male or the feisty heroine in distress, it was nice to spend time with a cast of characters who not only had functional family relationships, but also had actual friends. I especially admired the fact that the characters were so well rounded in a short story format, when it must be tempting to cut out some details due to the space constraints.

The only thing in the anthology as a whole that I found annoying was a tendency to over-do income level and the cost of various material items. The constant comments on brand names (especially cars), amounts spent when shopping, or on the fact that a rug or pair of shoes was expensive got old fast. As a reader, I had no trouble believing that the characters made a good income and had great careers, so the repetitive stressing of the cost or expensiveness of cars, cloths, houses, etc. was a distracting element in the stories.