Upcoming Book Review (3 Sep): “There Is No Death In Finding Nemo”, by Jeffrey M. Feingold

Reading time: 2 mins

Carrie Fisher, Vivien Leigh, Sylvia Plath.

★★★☆☆

There Is No Death In Finding Nemo got it right: it is a great movie. And a great dog name.

But there is more than one death in the movie, and not the one one of the characters in Jeffrey M. Feingold’s book talks about.

That, however, is not the reason for the ungenerous rating.

“My book is open, your mouth should be shut.”

In The Narcissist’s Library, a woman discards her sister’s advice about taking things slowly with a man she has just met, and she will pay the price discovering his secret.

A man’s quest for youth in The Mirror will make us put his sanity up for discussion, as in the story of the pianist in The Loneliest Number.

Surrealism creeps in in the shape of a wooden artifact in The Box, but also as an extraordinary opportunity in Avram’s Miracle.

The closing stories explore heritage and family in Rich Girl, but also love and regret in There Is No Death In Finding Nemo.

As in any collection of stories, some are inevitably better than others.

“A woman cannot survive on books alone. She also needs a dog.”

The message behind each one of the seven stories is unique and deep, and it makes up for the ups-and-downs of Jeffrey M. Feingold’s style. The latter is the reason why I couldn’t give a higher rating than that.

It surely is a subjective like or dislike, but also an objective one – in some the author’s style seems to be too flat, simplistic, to the point of feeling not developed to its full potential, like it is in other stories. It pains me to admit, but the closing story that gives the name to the book was also the one I felt more lacking, when I had high expectations.

Sometimes the mixed impression comes from the same story, and this is partly subjective: as an example, the dialogues in the background of a phone call were my absolute favourites and make for an experimental skill that Jeffrey M. Feingold certainly owns, but the rest of the story fails to back them up as strongly.

The characters are very likeable for the very few pages in which we meet them, and we don’t fail to create a bond with them the majority of the time. It’s remarkable that it happens so quickly, and even more so that the author uses the same name, more likely the same character, in different stories.

Final Thoughts

All of the meaningful stories in There Is No Death In Finding Nemo have an unexpected twist at the end, that places Jeffrey M. Feingold amongst the authors that I’m sure to remember.

Table of contents
The Narcissist’s Library
The Mirror
Avram’s Miracle
The Box
The Loneliest Number
Rich Girl
There Is No Death In Finding Nemo

**Thanks to NetGalley, Jeffrey M. Feingold, and Impspired Press for an ARC of the book.**