This book is full of mischievous moments to tender moments. This book is a collection of glorious humor and immense kindness, This was a quick and easy read. Any story by Katherine Heinz is alway fun to read and think about.

4 stars
I love Heiny's writing! So many normal and potentially boring passages were sooo interesting and funny. This collection of short stories is very mundane, but in that normalcy Heiny creates spunky characters and great inner dialogue. The stories often followed mishaps in people's lives and they had somewhat of a negative tone, but still had humor and light-heartedness to them. I thoroughly enjoyed this read!

I like how the stories tell different themes, and it's just the whole vibes and not here for the plot.

Short story collections are often very hard to rate if you didn't love all the stories...and needless to say, I did not love all of these stories. Several I found to be pretty boring, and had to push myself to finish. A few had very vague, anti-climactic endings. The one I truly loved was about a woman and her slowly (yet quickly) dying father. IYKYK. Having lost my FIL a few months ago, it was extremely relatable. Beyond that, these stories just didn't really click for me. I hope others find more enjoyment than I did!

I'm realizing short story collections are hard for me to rate. I think my parameter for like and dislike is not so deep so in the sense that some of these stories I liked and some I disliked just defaults to a 3 stars for me.

Thank you so much to @aaknopf and @netgalley for the gifted advance review copy. All thoughts are my own.

Games and Rituals is charming collection of character studies from a very talented (and funny!) writer. This is a quick, engaging read about relationships of all kinds. “Twist and Shout” is probably the best short story I’ve ever read about coping with aging parents – this story is a must read! There seems to be a consensus among reviewers that the front half of this collection is better than the back half, and I would agree. Still, I loved this intimate collection!

Short story collections usually mean hits and misses – it’s rare that I rave about a whole collection (the last time was here). Games and Rituals by Katherine Heiny is absolutely worth raving about.

There are eleven stories in the collection, all focused on the theme of love, and the various forms it takes – friendships, ex-husbands, parents and children, and ill-advised trysts. And all eleven stories are funny. Not necessarily laugh-out-loud funny (although I did) but the wry smile kind of funny. Deadpan funny. And I felt like the humour was just for me because everything Heiny writes about peri menopause, parenting teenagers, bridesmaids’ dresses, dealing with ageing parents and the little stuff that I lose my shit over, was exactly right.

She told William…she was in perimenopause. She had given him a printed checklist of thirty-four symptoms of perimenopause: irritability, lack of libido, hot flashes, mood swings, headaches, constipation, gum problems, tingling extremities, fatigue, dizziness, burning tongue… She had checked every single box except incontinence.
Two days later, she asked him for the list back and checked the incontinence box, too.

And there was also stuff that made me laugh because it was so weirdly specific – someone disliking their neighbour because they forced them to go to a Colour Me Beautiful party in the eighties, and another who thought their friend was making a bad choice of husband but notes, “….also, she has a pocket in her wedding dress, which is very unusual…” (Pockets in dresses are essential – wish I’d thought of that for my wedding dress).

There are some standouts – in Bridesmaid, Revisited, Marilee is suffering from a laundry and life crisis, and wears a huge taffeta bridesmaid’s dress to work which, as she sets up the projector for a staff meeting, ‘…rustles like a palm tree in a typhoon.‘

In Damascus, a woman’s ex-husband asks her to drop by his office after-hours to sign some papers. All straight forward. However they end up doing a line of cocaine and having sex.

First she felt, then she felt cold, then she had a profound idea that would revolutionize the way she did laundry.
“Give me a notebook,” she said to Jack-Henry. “I need to write this down.”
“Later,” Jack-Henry said, sliding his hand up her skirt.
“I can take notes while you do that,” said Mia, who now felt capable of anything, including multitasking. So Jack-Henry gave her a legal pad and a fountain pen and put his hand under her skirt again… Mia made a quick drawing of her laundry room with arrows showing the route dirty clothes would take on their way to sparkling clean in her new system. She sketched three laundry baskets and next to the third one, she wrote VERY IMPORTANT! DON’T FORGET! and circled it several times. (She would have no memory of the importance later.)
Then she put the legal pad aside, unzipped Jack-Henry’s trousers, and they got it on.

Twist and Shout made me laugh and cry. Ericka’s cranky elderly father mistakes his $4000 hearing aid for a cashew and eats it. Naturally Ericka has to organise a replacement and it is far from straightforward.

This simple event contains multitudes: sorrow and entitlement and love and annoyance. It also contains the four separate appointments – assessment, hearing test, fitting, programming – you made and took him to in order to get the hearing aid in the first place. He’s not even supposed to be eating cashews! He has high blood pressure!

Without spoilers, this is pretty much a perfect short story.

And lastly, we meet empty-nesters, William and his Marie-Kondo-obsessed wife in CobRa –

William’s wife’s name was Rachel Coburn, so her Japanese nickname would be (or could be, sort of) CobRa. William told her this, however unwisely. He was trying to make jokes, trying to spark joy. It was in short supply lately.

As Rachel ‘KonMari-s’ their house, William wonders if there is much more she can give up and still remain the person he’d married. The decluttering continues, but he draws the line when she reaches for his books –

William had done many shameful things out of his love for CobRa – he had agreed turkey meatballs were as good as regular, he had watched all of Scandal, he had briefly grown a mustache which made him look like Dr. Phil – but he refused to do this. He told CobRa she had to keep all the books with his name written on the flyleaf…

In all of the stories, Heiny demonstrates how to create normal, believable characters while maintaining tension and humour and startlingly good writing. Guaranteed to brighten your day.

4.5/5

I received my copy of Games and Rituals from the publisher, Harper Collins Australia (and Knopf), via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

This was a fun collection of essays showing all sides of humankind. I love the small details Heiny adds to her writing, it brings so much depth. I’ll admit there were a few sexual references that were too edgy for my taste, but overall I enjoyed Games and Rituals.

This was the first book I have written from this author and I think that she has a fresh take on the little idiosyncrasies that people face in their everyday life. I think the peculiarities were what made this book so interesting. I would definitely like to read more from this author in the future. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

A variety of stories that mainly focused on relationships in their many forms, whether that be intimate, parent and child, friends, or lovers. I enjoyed how mundane it ultimately was; and I meant this in a complimentary way - these are scenarios I could see playing out, just as Heiny has written them. But, they were also enormously funny or quirky, and had a lot of heart. I liked how most of the stories ended with a small twist or transgression of sorts, I thought that spoke to our humanity. This is my first experience with Katherine Heiny, but I'll definitely seek out more.

Loved this collection of short stories. They were all unique yet engaging. Will read more from this author. Five out of five stars.

I will recommend to readers interested in short stories. Many readers are unfamiliar with short stories, so for certain readers, this would be one they might enjoy. Easy to read with interesting characters. Katherine Heiny has become an author to watch.

Many thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced copy!

Unfortunately, I requested this not know it was a collection of stories. I am not a fan of story collections so I was unable to finish this. However, the writing was beautiful.

I like to savor short story collections, and I spent the last month slowly reading GAMES AND RITUALS.

Katherine Heiny is an auto-buy author for me, and just like in her novels STANDARD DEVIATION and EARLY MORNING RISER, the stories in this collection beautifully depict slice-of-life moments. She has a way of making stories feel light and humorous, then hitting you with an emotional wallop at the end.

Usually, I would call out a few favorites, but as I revisit them writing this review, I can’t decide. Each story surprised me in its uniqueness, how creative yet relatable the characters’ situations were.

This collection is a total delight. It feels like a masterclass in writing about complicated relationships and everyday love and heartbreak. I can’t recommend it enough!

Katherine Heiny delivers a killer short story collection here! Each of the stories feels complete and pretty easy to follow. I was only familiar with Heiny's work from Early Morning Rise, which did not feel quite as gripping to me as Games and Rituals. The writing feels like you are peeking into a small slice of each main character's life, filled with quirky, lovable, or even achingly sad stories.

I find it difficult to rate anthology collections like this because of the diversity of the stories, but some of my favorites were: CoBra, Games and Rituals, and Chicken-Flavored and Lemon-Scented. I would highly recommend this if you're a fan of contemporary / literary fiction short stories, something that's going to move you and make you laugh.

I don’t usually reach for short story collections but this book definitely has me thinking I’ve been missing out. Games and Rituals is a great collection of stories that showcase snippets into the characters’ lives. From a divorced couple worried about their son to a woman helping her husband and his ex pack up her house, the stories read quickly and had me laughing out loud at parts.

I'm an inattentive reader at the beginning of almost every book, because I start paying attention when I start caring about the characters. This makes me avoid a lot of collections of short stories, because in a single collection, there are so many times I have to get involved all over again. This is not a problem with this author's stories. They're so engaging and so much fun to read that I start to care immediately, and I start to laugh soon after that.

In this collection, I especially loved the story of Charlie, a woman who, with her husband, is helping his first wife move out of her house- awkward because her husband left his first wife decades ago because he fell in love with Charlie. It’s catty in all the right ways. In another, the narrator’s wife is Marie-Kondo-ing their house, and he’s afraid he doesn’t inspire enough joy for her to keep him. The first story in the book is about coworkers who work as driver’s license testers. It’s all funny and warm and deeply human, with memorable characters. I’ve read everything Heiny’s written and will continue to do so!
1 like

Very enjoyable and quick read. I was honestly a bit surprised at how much I liked it despite some really morally ambiguous characters. Will definitely be checking out more from the author.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for my e-arc. Katherine Heiny has done it again with encapsulating the realities of life through each short story. Katherine Heiny is quickly becoming an auto-read author for me and I can't wait to see what's next!

This is a wonderful collection of short stories that explores the highs and lows of life. Each one beautifully explores its characters and worlds and feels like a mini-novel. I laughed, I teared up and I couldn't put this book down .

Thanks to AA Knopf and NetGalley for the copy to review.