The view of this boy's world is gritty and harsh but enriched by an imagination fed by intelligence and fortitude. Each vignette is presented in clipped but rich language and reflects the experience of a young man soaked in the traditional masculine soup of his father's care but seeing beyond the given to other ways of being.

The Ambassador of What is a collection of short stories by Adrian Michael Kelly focusing mostly on father-son relationships. I found the book quite an easy read and enjoyed the realism elements of the stories. Despite the book being quite short, I definitely think that the first part of the book is the strongest and contains the best stories (the marathon one was my absolute favourite). I wasn't massively blown away by this book, but it is good and I would still recommend it for short story fans.

I'm generally a fan of short stories because they allow you to dip in and out of a writer's thinking and experience different voices and sometimes even styles from the same person. That isn't the case with this slim volume. The writing is clipped and while that's not a problem for me generally, in this case I felt it kept me from understanding these men. None of the stories was a particular standout for me. Thanks to Netgalley for the ArC. I'm an outlier on this, I'm sure, and so you should try it if you like short stories.

This book had an interesting concept, and I quite enjoyed the second story, the wedding between Jack and the Mom and the underlying reason why the mom was marrying Jack was quite an interesting read. I did also enjoy the first story, with the marathon. I know first hand how marathons feel and I liked the eleven year old.

The third story dragged on for me, far less intriguing than the first two.

This was a good book, I just don’t really quite understand what the point of the stories were when all combined. I wish maybe they connected more? Or I feel like I missed something that made them a singular book and not three completely unrelated stories?

The writing style was also a little bit harder to grasp for me. I felt like the first person narration remained the same for the three different personalities, where I even thought for a moment that it was the same eleven year old that had grown up in the second story.

This wasn’t a bad book, not necessarily, but I just felt that I had missed a key part, and it didn’t leave me satisfied in the end.

I've read many short-story collections and this stands out as one of the most challenging. Kelly's stories focus heavily on the male experience, frequently exploring the tensions within the father-son bond. Inevitably, Hemingway's macho ghost looms large in places, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sections of unattributed dialogue let down several stories and begin to look like space fillers, and the abrupt narrative style can get tiring. However, there's an intriguing through-line of perseverance and self-improvement that makes reading The Ambassador of What, while hard-going in places, ultimately worthwhile.

The style of writing just didn't do anything for me.

Because of that,I didn't find it hugely enjoyable.

Collection of short stories with a particular focus on family relationships and the young male experience.

Short fiction stylized with laconic masculinity, these stories are not even slices of life, more like crudely carved up tasters. Tales of familial relationships in small town Canada, all tough, manly, with clipped dialogue and bare bones plot approach…there just isn’t much here, definitely style over substance and I didn’t care for either. Due to the low word count per page this only took 100 minutes for 180 pages and wasn’t even remotely worth the time. Nothing wrong with realism, but this is all one grimy grubby side of it, and while I appreciate economy of language when done well, here it’s overdone, overcooked, burnt really, no meat, just skeletal remains of what fiction ought to be. Thanks Netgalley.