Some Have Entertained Angels, Unaware

       This short story, by McCracken, is vastly different from the first story I read. I found this surprising, especially because they are from the same collection of stories, I was expecting to be able to draw a similarity between the two. This story is about a father who opens and runs a boarding house after he is widowed, left with two children. Mid way through the story, the father abruptly quits his job and deserts his children, leaving them to the care of the occupants of his boarding house.
      Stylistically, I found this to be unique to the first. The second one is a hybrid between poetry and short story writing. I found she utilizes techniques like varied sentence structure, heightened imagery, colorful diction and extended metaphor. Not to say that these can't be used in short story writing, however I felt like the story read more like a poem in comparison to the previous story. I found the use of extended metaphor to make this story have a deeper fold. The father was a librarian by profession; the author uses this to characterize his action as well as to describe the boarders and the house. For example she compares all of the boarders' stories to books in a library. This metaphor helped to bring deeper meaning to the father's overloaded brain as well as the shed light on the confusing life his family led...it was something he couldn't simply organize which is why he felt he needed to run away.
       Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this change in her style of writing. It shows McCracken is a versatile, risk taking writer, a very admirable quality.  I'm excited to read what comes next!