This is a collection of short stories focusing on the kinds of events in our lives that lead us to make important decisions – decisions to “begin again.”

I have been a fan of short stories since I was in seventh or eighth grade, and introduced to O Henry and Edgar Allen Poe. I still enjoy the form.

In Soft Like Snow we witness a heart-breaking scene between a mother and daughter whose dreams have been destroyed by injury and alcohol. A teenaged girl being raised by a widowed father is stretching her boundaries and seeking independence in dangerous ways in Rationing Sweets. In other stories a troubled young man matures as he watches his father descend into mental illness; a young woman visits her aunt in Chicago, cherishing their summer together until the neighbors from hell move into the apartment above; a woman reluctantly invites her ailing mother to stay only to discover that her mother’s life is much fuller than her own.

The scenarios, characters and locations differ, but they all share a theme of life-altering decisions. Most of the stories are rather dark – not too many happy endings here. It was a quick read, and I enjoyed reading the collection.
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Jen Knox has written a short story collection that unveils the souls of its characters through simple vignettes and everyday experiences. She finds a kind of painful poetry in the mundane choices we make, or the paths we find ourselves stumbling down as the result of decisions we didn't even realize we were making.

Even when her characters speak rationally, they seem driven by emotions of which they aren't fully aware. There is an admirable lightness of touch on display here, no showboating, no moralizing. Knox is humane without being sentimental. Her characters aren't always sympathetic, which makes them all the more believable.

The stories tend to flash fiction length with the longest being 13 pages but most just a few. Even so, they felt sufficient to communicate a contained experience without leaving me wanting more. They each captured a brief chapter in someone's life, and they did it realistically.

My only criticism? She deserves a much better cover than she got. The cover verges on sappy, and that's a very poor reflection of the emotional honesty on display here. ( )

In this book, I attempt to capture those pivotal moments that we (powerful word, we, I know) can all look back on in our lives; those moments that prove that sometimes the small decisions lead to the most monumental transitions. Stories and narrative essays from this collection have been published in Annalemma, Bananafish, Flashquake, Superstition Review, and elsewhere.

Some of the stories:

In “Soft like Snow”, a young girl thinks about running away from an abusive home, but as she reflects upon her current circumstances, her past reminds her of her abuser's humanity and why she's stayed until now. In “Untied”, a husband and wife are facing bankruptcy. They’re frustrated, and each is seduced, in a way, to give up on each other and move on—but it is the smaller decisions and interactions that determine the outcome of their family. ( )

Knox's To Begin Again sizzles and crackles with the stuff of life.

I've been guilty of gravitating to mostly popular novels. A great number of them are watered down versions of writing, cotton candy visions wrapped in saccharine adjectives and banal adverbs.

This collection of short stories and essays made my fingers tingle and my feet fidget. I always have a physical reaction to excellent prose; it is something to which I have never been able to become desensitized. But Knox's stories were different: they actually made me want to take out my pen and start writing. Characters on the brink of their own personal realizations, in the act of becoming, are incredibly inspiring, and Knox crafts them with a subtlety and complexity that surpasses expectation.

A teenage girl pinned between the numbing sensations of her parents' divorce and the exhilaration of rebellion and abandon.

A widower coping with the loss of his wife and the sudden appearance of his estranged son.

A woman assaulted for no apparent reason and helped by not one of the many onlookers that day.

A couple scraping by and struggling to break even in face of unemployment, emotional apathy, disillusion, and adultery.

Each story left me wanting to learn more about the characters that inhabit them.

I will keep an eye out for future Knox releases. In the meantime, I will be writing.

Excerpt:

The men I love die and, even if they live, my daily rituals are becoming too all-consuming for me to entertain distracting and emotive pastimes such as romance. I must learn to be methodical if I want to continue to live a productive life. After all, I have been elected for this self-study of old age and must make the most of it. Take, for instance, the curious nature of my own bones as they begin to shrink and curve toward the ground. I had never really noticed my body beginning to hunch over until I got out of bed a year ago, stood up straight and realized that I was still facing the floor. The experience caused me to pay attention to the drastic changes occurring in my body each day. Sometimes I feel honored; it is as though I have been allowed the exclusive experience of old age and I should make the most of it.

Surely you can look back on a pivotal moment in your life and say, “Thank God I decided to…” Author Jen Knox brings us To Begin Again, a collection of short stories that invite us to fill in that blank.

Knox’s voice is distinct and honest. Her stories are hard-hitting and biting, her prose crisp and direct. Knox’s stories explore pivotal moments in people’s lives and elicit strong feelings in the reader. Some are framed around the harsher side of life, but each is told with candor. One female character says, “A smack across the face can cause a woman’s adrenaline to surge, helping her to feel for the first time in months.”

In Knox’s words, “good short story writing is an interactive process, a way to engage a reader, not just entertain.” She delivers well on that account. Cheever, Carver and Updike are inspirations for her stories. Although Knox can clarify a character’s situation deftly within a paragraph or two, don’t look for character development. You will find no neat bow tie at the end of her stories. Instead, the reader is left to fill in the blanks about the consequences of the life-altering decisions made by her characters. I appreciate authors who give me the benefit of the doubt, making me use my imagination, rather than feeding an entire story line punctuated with a neat ending. Jen Knox is such an author.

If your moral compass steers you away from adult situations, heady sex and strong language, To Begin Again may not be for you.

Knox’s stories are sometimes raw and intense, illustrations of life pulling the rug out from under us, forcing us to make snap decisions about whether to take a left or a right. I would love to read a book by Jen Knox with a gentler approach. She is an author to watch. ( )