I did not care for this book at all. "The Awakening" at the very least merited a reading, but the other pieces are simply not good at all.
The interesting thing about "The Awakening" is that it might be termed an "existential" work, long before that term came into popular use. I found the central concern of the story to be an engagement of Albert Camus' declaration that the only legitimate philosophical question is whether or not to commit suicide. Kate Chopin does deserve credit for attempting to address this question in her book, but in the end, I do not feel she provided an adequate answer for her heroine's actions. That aside, I was not engaged by the writing and found myself in a hurry to finish the story, simply to be done with it. The summary on the back of the book describes the story as "inspiring". I found myself at a loss as to the nature of the inspiration. Lacking that, I finished reading without having been moved in any way emotionally or intellectually.
The other pieces in the book I found simply awful. The writing was poor, the attempts at working in dialect embarassing, the stories themselves tending towards triteness.