Everyone in L.A. - Terence Clarke

Leaving work in the earliest hours of the morning and catching the 1 train home, Pat Cronin is forced—as everyone else on the train is also—to listen to a female passenger talk loudly into her cell phone on the same car. Terence Clarke's Everyone in L.A. follows Pat and the female passenger, Tiffany, who is presumably talking about an ex boyfriend and his new girlfriend, all the way to New York's 72nd Street Station. While Pat has no choice but to eavesdrop on Tiffany's conversation, his imagination wanders to its subjects, Mitch and Lila, and a hilarious compilation of possible scenarios about this unknown love-triangle ensues. The writer in Pat tugs us into visions fuelled by both classic literature and New Hollywood creativity.

Terence Clarke's Everyone in L.A. is a clever, witty, and wonderful short story about chance encounters, and how even the most negligible moments can have a resonating impact on our daily lives. Despite its short length, Clarke's character's are fleshed out and well developed. His descriptions and depictions are fantastic, and his satire is as infectious as it is entertaining. Grammar and formatting is the only drawback to the short story as a whole, but is easily forgiven by the brilliant content, which is too good to be pulled out of by a rogue run-on sentence. I would recommend Terence Clarke's Everyone in L.A. to anyone looking for a quick and captivating read, and whole heartedly give it five stars for its ingenuity and humor.

Reviewed with a free ARC from Readers' Favorite.

FIVE STARS

Amazon Link: Everyone in L.A. (New York Stories)





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