New Book Alert: Sympathetic People by Donna Baier Stein; Moving Emotional Stories Reveal Various Hidden Chambers of the Human Heart

New Book Alert: Sympathetic People by Donna Baier Stein; Moving Emotional Stories Reveal Various Hidden Chambers of the Human Heart




By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

PopSugar Reading Challenge: A book that you meant to read in 2019


Spoilers: Donna Baier Stein's anthology Sympathetic People is filled with love stories, but not love in the traditional sense. There are romances but the stories also involve love between friends, family members, or parents and children. Stein's writing explores love in many forms.

However, they should not be mistaken for happy ending stories where love conquers all. Instead the character's emotions often compel them to do reckless, obsessive, and sometimes hurtful things in the name of love or what they perceive as love. In fact, many of the stories feature conflicts between the character's individuality and personal needs against those of the objects of their affection.

Sympathetic People explores the depth of emotion found in the human heart and how love and hate can be the two strongest most similar emotions.

All of the stories are moving, emotional, and character driven. The best are the following:


Versions-This story explains where the title of the anthology comes from in a haunting opening paragraph that summarizes the theme carried out in each story. It says, "We are all sympathetic people. Individually or two by two. None of us has ever resisted a midnight call from a witch-held friend, sat while a pearl-haired senior stood in the aisle of a bus, or shoplifted anything but books and that was many years ago."

This story focuses on that concept of being sympathetic and caring to people even at the cost of one's own personal happiness. The Narrator is in her second comfortable marriage when she learns that her husband's first wife is coming to town and needs help finding a place to live.

The Narrator's internal conflict focuses on how people see others in different stages in their lives and how those perspectives shape how we always think of that person. The Narrator thinks of herself as the version that her first husband saw: the free spirited artist living below her means. She then remembers how her current husband sees her: as a wealthy matron flipping through catalogs and selecting furniture for her upscale home. Her kindness towards Nina is a way of reconciling the woman that she was in that desperate situation and the woman she is with the resources that she can use to help.

The Secret of Snakes-This story provides the Reader with a venomous racer snake as a symbol of the decline of a marriage. Arlene is snake sitting for her son while he is away at camp. Meanwhile, Arlene has to watch as her husband practically flaunts his affair with a younger assistant and Arlene contemplates an affair
of her own.

The racer snake becomes a symbol of Arlene's repression. As long as she is following the instructions, Arlene has control over the snake just as she does with her marriage. Unfortunately, human (and snake) nature can not always be bound by rules. In one violent encounter with the racer, Arlene's repression ends and she gives into the rage and passion that she kept hidden.


In Heraklion- An SNL sketch features a parody commercial in which people are encouraged to visit Italy but the pitch people remind you that the trip won't make you feel comfortable with your body. It won't give you marriage counseling and you may go hiking but the vacation to Italy will not turn you into a person who likes hiking. In other words, a vacation might be fun and relaxing, but you are still the same person and sometimes the problems and perception that you have follow you on your trip.

In her story, "In Heraklion", Stein gives us beautiful evocative description of Crete's sunny beaches, historic ruins, and locals who cater to tourists. However, she also gives us two women who are visiting Crete as one of them is recovering from a doomed relationship with a married man.

It's an interesting dichotomy comparing the pleasant setting with the confused and neurotic characters that inhabit it. The story suggests that emotions can't be denied and worries and frustrations will remain no matter how beautiful the scenery is.


Hindsight- This story carries irony in which a woman recalls a long friendship that she and her husband had with another couple that ended in betrayal and hurt feelings.

The friendship between the two couples is described with various small moments such as the two women getting to know one another while their husbands worked on their dissertations or an Independence Day party where the friends lit sparklers before all hell broke loose. The Reader also sees how the changing times of the 1960's-'70's affected the marriages as the Narrator's husband published his Civil War book and became absorbed in work and her friend, Jessie, became involved in feminist politics. Seeing the decline in Jessie's marriage, the Narrator does everything that she can to hold onto her husband.

Years later, the Narrator reflects on the choices that she, Jessie, and their husbands made and how they all ended up in the same place. In one final ironic twist, it becomes clear to the Reader, though maybe not to the Narrator, that her memories of Jessie are clearer and more pronounced that those of her husband and that she might miss Jessie more than she is willing to admit.


The Jewel Box- I must admit as a native St. Louisian, I get a delight whenever my city is mentioned and this is no exception. One of the reasons I love this story is because it shouts out to one of my favorite places: Forest Park, a place with many wonderful attractions. One is The Jewel Box. The Jewel Box is a greenhouse filled with the loveliest flowers. It is not very well known and doesn't receive near as much local attention as Forest Park's other attractions or the larger Missouri Botanical Gardens on Shaw Blvd. However, The Jewel Box is a sight to behold and one to remember.

This is the memory that Sarah tries to give to her ailing grandmother, Nini. As Nini lays in the hospital, Sarah fills her with childhood memories particularly the trip the duo took to St. Louis from Kansas City.

Sarah describes The Jewel Box exquisitely in beautiful terms such as "There were tropical trees, waterfalls, and fountains, and below us, golden pheasants and flamingos flashed among the bushes and streams. In the trees, there were scarlet Ibis. A touch pool with turtles and crayfish." Her descriptions of The Jewel Box create an image of a fairyland of childhood nostalgia that Sarah longs to reach with her grandmother. She wants Nini to hold onto the young woman that she was, but also wants to recapture the child that Sarah was if only through words.

Lovers #1-5 or Why I Hate Kenny Rogers-A first person narrator can make or break a short story and this case, surely makes it. A woman describes her past romantic relationships in an attempt to explain what happened last Sunday when she had sex for the first time in five years since her divorce.

The Narrator has a frank, rambling, funny way of describing her former lovers such as #1 who she refers to "as the first man (she) really fell in love with who turned out to be gay and killed himself." She uses that distinction in the strangest places such as when she describes him then suddenly remembered, oh yeah, he used to wear white tennis shoes. (As though his sexuality, suicide, and the white tennis shoes were somehow linked.)

A woman being so honest about her past sexual history might come across as victimized or provocative, but this woman's narration allows her to come across as blunt, world weary, and self-depreciating with a sardonic sense of humor that is aware of her shortcomings. She is aware that she is reducing these men to numbers instead of names, but she cautions that she doesn't hate these men, or any men for that matter. They were very nice, "but sometimes there's a gut reaction (she has) that can feel like hate, or the neighbor of it, like it did last Sunday."

As the Narrator recounts the various lovers over the years, she recalls how much she changed in her interactions about what she received from them and they got from her: #1: a sexless innocent friendship, #2: a quick passionate sexually charged fling, #3: a relationship based on intellectual quality and ideals, #4: an intense affair with a married man, and #5: the one she married that she considered her true love and not a fantasy but was rocked by personality disorders. They changed as she aged, her lovers representing herself in different stages of life.

The subtitle comes from an NPR interview where country/pop singer Kenny Rogers talked about his six previous marriages and said that he loved all of his wives. He also spoke of his politics and how he befriended Presidents on both sides of the political spectrum saying "that he loves concepts more than people." The Narrator fumes that she hates that attitude about certain men, but can't ignore how similar she is to Roger's words. Rogers reflects the worst things about herself and she knows it too. She too loves the concept of true love more than the men. She is aware that she has been in a cycle and that is hard for her to break free.

However, her encounter last Sunday with Randy, (not #6, significantly he has a name), suggests that she is ready to get past her rocky romantic past and finally have a lasting committed relationship.
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Sympathetic People is a beautiful anthology that causes the Reader to look inside the human heart. Some of what they find might be painful, some pleasing, but always memorable.