(1.5/5) Roar is a collection of short stories on the same surface-level subjects. The 30 stories leave no room for thought and relies on far-from-subtle metaphors. Half of the stories simply take terms literally and runs with it (see: “The Woman Who Was Pigeonholed,” “The Woman Who Jumped on the Hills,” and “The Woman Who Cherry-Picked”). Half the time, it felt like Ahern was trying to guilt-trip the reader (see: the one about the bandwagon and the one about grass — I’m getting lazy to write the whole thing out). I think the worst crime is that Ahern doesn’t even seem to trust her own world-building and storytelling. “The Woman Who Slowly Disappeared,” was pretty good, up until it explained what ‘society’ was doing to women as if women, the target audience AND protagonist, wouldn’t be able to figure it out on their own. Might as well have made some of these stories essays and TED Talks. On top of that, a great number of these stories came down to a woman realising something because of a man (see: the one about the heart on the sleeve, the one about the ticking clock, and the one about cherry-picking) AND a whole other bunch is about women putting down other women (see: grass, bandwagon and blew away). The dialogue... is a little hard to read and take seriously. But there’s more! The one about the strong suit and mirrors wrote women to be complete idiots — they made me want to scream. Most made me roll my eyes. There’s two that I found worth reading by the end of it: “The Woman Who Ordered the Seabass Special” and “The Woman Who Found The World in Her Oyster.” But even then, the concept of “Thirty women. Thirty stories.” meant to represent “the women who befriend us,” “encourage us,” and “make us brave” — or to put it simply meant to be diverse — couldn’t have been written by one white woman. This concept would’ve been beautiful if it was a compilation of short stories by female writers of different backgrounds, ages, sizes, ethnicities and more to have achieved anything close to its goal.

Roar by Cecelia Ahern is made up of 30 short stories, and are all stories about different women, one per story, who each have something to discover.  They are enjoyable stories, and feel like fables, as each story has a message.  I enjoyed the surprise of the moment of revelation in each story, and trying to guess where we were going to be led. These are very much told from the point of view of these women do not value themselves sufficiently but are uplifting.  Roar  was published on 1st November 2018 and is available from  Amazon ,  Waterstones  and  Bookshop.org . You can follow Cecelia Ahern on  Facebook ,  Twitter ,  Instagram  and her  website . I was given this book in exchange for an unbiased review, so my thanks to NetGalley and to  HarperCollins .

I tried. I really did. Having loved PS I Love You (the book, not the movie) I have always wanted to read more of her works. But the two I have, I just could not get into. This book is listed as a feminist short story collection of women's lives blended with "magical realism." It is meant to show you how women "navigate the world today." To me, it just felt like a bunch of stereotypes with a dash of suspending reality - the first story tells the tale of a woman who is disappearing due to her age and is trying to have people see her again. I couldn't finish this one. I received this e-book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.