Elizabeth Bruce’s Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories is a sharp, tender, and often bittersweet collection of flash fiction and short stories, each orbiting around a simple but rich motif: a single dollar bill. Organized into sections like “Couples,” “Parents and Children,” and “Known Associates,” Bruce sketches lives touched by longing, disappointment, love, and small acts of rebellion. These are slice-of-life portraits told with an economy of words that somehow still manage to feel lush and textured, like she’s captured a thousand messy human emotions in just a few brushstrokes.

Bruce’s writing absolutely floored me from the start. She has this uncanny way of wrapping heartbreak and humor into the same breath. Like in “Universally Adored,” when Fran clutches a Christmas card from her ex and spirals into memories of their love, Bruce paints their collapse with such tender vividness that I almost felt like I’d lived it myself. The scene where Fran stands over her art supplies, caught between choosing color or stability, just broke me a little. Bruce doesn’t overdo anything; she just nudges your heart until it cracks open on its own. The way she captured that ache of holding on too long? Masterful.

That said, sometimes the super short pieces felt almost too fleeting. “Grocery List,” for example, is this hilarious, chaotic monologue from a tired mom scheming with coupons, but it’s over in a blink. I loved it (laughed out loud, actually), but it left me wanting just a little more meat on the bone. Same with “Magic Fingers,” a one-dollar vibrating bed becomes this strange little portal to hope and survival, and I swear I could have read a whole novel about Paulina. But that’s part of Bruce’s style: she trusts her readers to fill in the silences, even if sometimes you wish she’d linger a minute longer.

One thing I kept noticing was how cleverly Bruce uses ordinary objects to tell bigger stories about class, love, and loss. A crumpled dollar in “Bald Tires” becomes a stand-in for betrayal. A misplaced dollar in “Cargo Pants” turns into a lifeline for a lost kid. These little everyday dramas are told without any fancy footwork or pretension, and that’s what makes them hit so hard. Her characters are folks you know or maybe even are. Flawed, hopeful, desperate, trying to make a life out of less than enough.

If you’re the kind of reader who loves authors like Raymond Carver, Lucia Berlin, or even early Ann Beattie, then Universally Adored and Other One Dollar Stories will absolutely be your jam. I’d recommend this book to anyone who has a soft spot for scrappy, gutsy storytelling about real people in all their complicated glory. Just be warned: these stories might be short, but they’ll stay with you way, way longer than you expect.

Pages: 162 | ASIN: B0CKXK5X5T