Rating: 4.5🌈
I simply don’t read enough stories by this remarkable author. Curio by C.S. Poe is an excellent way to find your way to this wonderful storyteller.
This short story really resonated with me as I just had someone drop off a dilapidated cardboard box full of old photographs, mostly mine, from the past. No dates, and haphazardly thrown in there, saved from the trash.
So a story that tackles the possibilities that lie behind forgotten old discarded photos hits home.
Poe’s characters, so vividly real and grounded in a place the author calls home, brings the humor and emotional layers so important to this. Llewellyn “Lew” Cooper with his aunt Julia run Curio Cabinet in New York City’s West Village. It’s a hodgepodge of Julia’s interests and antiques, including old photographs.
Then a handsome man comes, buying the photographs on a regular basis. Why? Who is he?
Poe beautifully builds this quietly emotional story of buried history revealed and love in all its forms. Curio comes to a happy ending leading forward for Henry and Lew that makes sense and leaves me absolutely satisfied.
This is a terrific read and the author is one you should have on your auto buy list.
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Blurb:
Llewellyn Cooper and his aunt Julia run Curio Cabinet in New York City’s West Village, where the clientele is as strange as the junk being amassed in their secondhand shop. Llewellyn and Julia have been as thick as thieves his entire life, and Llewellyn can’t imagine being anywhere else six days a week—even if Julia’s bizarre habits and inappropriate conversations drive him crazy. That’s family, though, right?
When Llewellyn drums up the nerve to chat with a routine customer—in part due to curiosity, as Henry McLaughlin returns time and again to purchase nothing but old photographs, but also because the bearded and bow tie–wearing man is the finest thing to ever step foot inside Curio—it seems like Llewellyn will finally have a plus-one for future RSVPs. But just when things start looking up in the romance department, it turns out Henry might be too strange for the Cooper family.
And that’s saying something
Emporium Press
February 05, 2024
Cover art: Reese Dante
Genre: Contemporary romance
60 pages
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 