Daniel’s Reviews > A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories > Status Update

"Mijito" is the first story in this collection I strongly dislike. It not only reads like writing--it reads like the kind of writing that comes out of creative writing MFA workshops. Spanish terms in italics and all. It's beneath Berlin.

One of the things I like about Berlin's writing style is it invites the reader to watch the mind of the writer at work much more openly than most writers would be willing to allow.

Berlin gets how class works in America on a level that very few of the writers I read and enjoy do.

I'm going to end up buying more of Berlin's books. This is a well-edited introductory collection and presents a writer with a style and sense of humor I sort of love.

Berlin's use of first-person is a bit strange at first. And I like that this collection of her work basically addresses that by having the bulk of the stories in the beginning be strictly first-person and then there is a story literally about the author's use of POV and why she writes that way before it starts incorporating more traditional third-person selections.

Berlin is one of the writers I'm glad I discovered recently. Her sentence construction makes the influence mid-to-late 20th century poetry had on her writing apparent and she's up there with Carson McCullers, Richard Yates, and Alice Munro when it comes to writing about poverty in North America in a way that rings true. I'm really enjoying the collection so far.