Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

It's evident that ZZ Packer is a very talented writer with her own extremely unique style. I feel like I'm sitting in front of her as we're drinking coffee and she's telling me these stories. She takes us into the lives of these characters in a tone that doesn't get stale nor repetitive. She has various themes in her stories that are great from keeping the reader from getting bored such as a group of drifters in Japan who are starving and unable to find work and a girl living in a ghetto who has ambitions of the larger world she's seen on the TV screens in the store nearby where even the shopkeeper has his own hope for fulfilling his own American Dream. When you mix similes and metaphors at the appropriate times as well as Packer's own vision imbued in the stories, you get an interesting read.