PositiveThe RumpusPeelle is an impressive prose stylist who focuses on human beings as members of communities, and the stories in Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing show how impoverished our collective life becomes when greed, neglect, and carelessness characterize human behavior ... Peelle doles out words as if they were scarce commodities, producing elliptical tales in which the occasional metaphor lights up an entire landscape ... Fine as Peelle’s dialog is, it’s often the small gesture that proves most revealing of character ... Peelle loses me only when she becomes overtly elegiac—those times I hear the violins whining plaintively in the background. Others may find some stories a tad too quiet. But her genius is to make scurrilous ne’er-do-wells into likeable, sympathetic characters.
