Book Talk: A short story and a confusing plot

The Gift

Although I discovered Freida McFadden only within the past year, she inched her way onto my list of favorable authors, replacing the James Patterson assembly-line books, supposedly co-authored with writers, most of whom would be strangers on my bookshelves.

Ms. McFadden is a physician, specializing in brain damage, and an entertaining writer. Her novels, most of which are psychological thrillers, are usually in the 350 to 450 page standard. But, “The Gift” (2020) is only 50 pages. She calls it a novella, but it’s really a short story, and well worth reading. It is written in a modernized style of the French 19th century author Guy de Maupassant. I enjoy his short stories when I took a course in European literature in the early 1960s. 

Unfortunately, one can’t really review a short story without giving too much away. Suffice it to say that McFadden’s work is about a protagonist who makes a huge sacrifice in order to give a loved one a really great present.