Common Sense & Other Tales of Disillusionment is a haunting collection of short stories that peels back the soft skin of ordinary life to reveal the raw nerves beneath. Each story takes place in familiar settings like a home, an office, and a neighborhood, but nothing stays familiar for long. Saxsma writes about people who are breaking down, sometimes quietly, sometimes violently, under the weight of their own choices and circumstances. The opening story, “Drive You to Violence,” sets the tone: a domestic world suffocating in silence and habit, where love and resentment sit side by side at the dinner table. The prose is stripped down, careful, yet full of emotional danger. By the end, the book has become a mirror that reflects not what we wish we were, but what we fear we might be.

What struck me first was the rhythm of Saxsma’s writing. It moves in circles, looping back on itself, pressing the reader to sit in the discomfort of repetition, the same routines, the same conversations, the same small cruelties. I found myself frustrated at times, but in a good way. That frustration was part of the experience. The language is plain and unadorned, but it works like sandpaper, roughing up the smoothness of everyday life until you can feel the grain. There’s an honesty to it that’s hard to shake. I didn’t feel like I was reading stories so much as eavesdropping on private lives that were coming undone in slow motion. Saxsma’s characters don’t confess their feelings. They leak them.

As I read deeper, I started feeling uneasy, almost complicit. The book makes you question what “normal” even means, and whether common sense is really sense at all or just a way to survive disappointment. Some scenes left me angry, others hollow. There were moments I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. Saxsma has a way of making the ordinary grotesque without ever being sensational. The writing reminded me how fragile the line is between patience and despair, between love and control. It made me think of people I know, people who keep smiling while their lives quietly cave in around them.

This isn’t a feel-good read. It’s a feel-something read. I’d recommend Common Sense & Other Tales of Disillusionment to anyone who likes fiction that cuts deep, that doesn’t flinch, and that finds truth in the cracks of small, painful moments. It’s for readers who don’t mind sitting in the dark for a while, trusting that somewhere in all that disillusionment, there’s something honest, maybe even redemptive, waiting to be found.

Pages: 258 | ASIN : B0D5BBB2FS