I thoroughly enjoyed some of the short stories (mainly the title piece and the final one) but found the others a little lacklustre. The homophobia in story one and animal abuse in story two added nothing to either narrative, so feel like these shouldn’t have been included, which dropped my rating to a 3 star.

I really enjoyed reading this book, I highly recommend it, thanks so much for giving it to me to read in advance, have recomended to friends

A middle-aged novelist devoid of inspiration alights on material in the form of an obsessive pet-shop worker from Cincinnati. I loved the emotionally complex stories in this novel. Will be recommending to friends and family.

Women and their connection to the world, especially men is the revolving source of inspiration for this story collection. Some of them were hit and some of them were miss. But all in all I loved reading them.

I really enjoyed this collection of short stories. I love a collection that focuses on women and their relationships with men, family and friends, and this was no exception. I loved the first story, and there were no stories that were misses for me which is very rare to find.

I cannot wait to read more from the author. I collection I strongly recommend.

Short stories are always hard to get right because, inevitably, the reader will love and dislike some. I really enjoyed this short story collection though, mainly stories of women and how we are connected with men. Loved it!

Returning to short fiction for the first time in twenty years, Total is a collection of seven stories from writer and filmmaker Rebecca Miller. There’s something chilling in these stories, with secrets kept and uncovered, but Miller stands at a distance, without judgement of her characters’ various flaws. The stories are often darky humourous, blending wit with morality, but with incidences of surprise in each. Some come to a close more abruptly than you might expect, leaving ambiguity to their endings and adding to a sense of unease.

Full review in Mslexia

I don’t think I’ve ever read such a diverse collection of stories- the title story in particular is different than anything I’ve read this year and I thought about it for a long time after I finished. Crossing various genres, these are stories that centre women and I enjoyed them all. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Years ago I read and enjoyed The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, and by sheer coincidence earlier this year I picked up a secondhand copy of Rebecca Miller’s first collection of short stories Personal Velocity, also her first book.

Browsing @netgalley recently, I saw she had a new collection of short stories called Total, an imaginative, arresting work consisting of seven short stories. I thought it was excellent.

The stories in Total are mostly about women and their relationship with themselves, the men in their lives and their families.

The standout story for me was the eponymous Total, about a young girl who rescues her Total sister (a sister born with several physical and intellectual disabilities arising from their mother’s involvement in the creation of the Total phone, a weird invention that allows people to experience an orgasm over the phone). It’s quirky, vividly imagined and very poignant.

The opening story is also cracking - a woman about to give birth to her third child and struggling to cope with the demands of a busy house and family is gifted a housekeeper/childcare by her mother in law with startling results.

A short collection I devoured, this is perfect for anyone who likes an offbeat, unsettling, perfectly formed short story. Miller has a knack for hitting a nerve, for finding a raw emotion and exploiting it with dark humour and mischief. 4/5 ⭐️

*Total was published on 1 September by Canongate books. Many thanks to the author, publisher and @netgalley for the ARC. As always, this is an honest review.*

This is an excellent collection of short stories. Ms. Miller has clearly inherited Dad Arthur's talent for creating believable, engaging characters and for telling their stories well. I particularly admire Total, which was beautifully structured, and Chekhovian, the style, content, and characters effectively reflecting the work of the master storyteller, Anton Chekov, himself. This is as a really enjoyable and memorable collection of stories and I heartily recommend you all read them, too. 4.5 stars.

Filmmaker and writer Rebecca Miller’s latest book contains seven, very short, stories, the entire collection barely more than a hundred pages. Miller returns over and over to overlapping themes around creation and creativity, Motherhood is a recurring preoccupation, as is the process of reading and writing. Mostly set in America, Miller’s stories abound with close-ups of characters who border on stereotype, often privileged, solipsistic, self-obsessed: the wayward teenager, the “promiscuous” woman cured by parenting; the anxious middle-class mother threatened by the values and behaviour of her lower-class housekeeper. I wasn’t always clear whether this strategy of framing her characters in such obvious ways was deliberate and would-be subversive, or not.

Except for the washed-up writer Ciaran in “She Came to Me” – currently being adapted for the screen - Miller’s key figures are women. “Mrs Covet” revolves around Daphne, who has two small boys and is pregnant with her third child. Unable to cope with domestic life, her mother-in-law hires a nurse/housekeeper, Nat aka Mrs Covet, partly to help and partly as an implicit judgement on Daphne’s supposed failings as a wife and caregiver. Their story follows a familiar trajectory, class conflict, clashes in values and an expose of lurking, middle-class anxieties. At times it reads like a variation on the kind of ‘fear of the other’ story made popular through films like The Hand that Rocks the Cradle and more recent novels like The Nanny, at others it seems to be critiquing this kind of narrative – mainly because of the uncertainty about the reliability of the self-deluding narrator Daphne who prides herself on being liberal but is revealed to have quite conventional views about gender. It’s intriguing and well-observed but for me it never quite manages to transcend its overworked territory.

The title story “Total” is the only one to eschew realism in favour of SF. Total Phones were a form of immersive technology, now scrapped because their use led to the birth of children with Total Syndrome, elfin-like, short-lived, uncommunicative, doll-like forms. The sister of one such child decides to liberate her from the Total facility where she’s expected to live until her death, but the consequences are disastrous. Here Miller flirts with ideas about technology and responsibility, as well as the impact of forms of surrogate parenting. Again, it’s an interesting, readable piece but somehow lacking in any real substance or force.

Miller also draws on outside sources for her pieces, sometimes reworking ideas from other genres or writers, as in “The Chekhovians.” “Receipts” draws on Erica Jong’s once-notorious Fear of Flying while “Vapors” central character Justine has more than a little in common with the Justine of de Sade’s novel.

Miller’s prose is often polished and lucid, and there are numerous instances of memorable, vivid imagery. Her stories are clever, sometimes pleasingly perverse, but they can also feel overly-compressed, reading a little like script synopses peppered with breathless, expositional passages, that rush through the critical events of their protagonists’ lives, experiences that have seemingly shaped their attitudes and current life choices. Sometimes too, Miller’s concept of what it is to be a mother was just too alien, hard for me to grasp or relate to, rooted in a very particular set of cultural assumptions that I don’t personally subscribe to. Although that could also make her pieces oddly fascinating.

Total is a collection of short stories narrating women's extraordinary and ordinary life and their relationships with the world, family, friends, nature and themselves.

The stories were very digestible and fun to read, sometimes getting weirder than a reader expected. These are the stories of unprecedented people with slightly twisted lives. They pique readers' curiosity and evoke different opinions and emotions.

Suitable for a bit older audience.
Great for those who prefer easygoing short stories.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing the ebook.

This is a collection of 7 short stories, and I found it to be a real mixed bag. I did not enjoy the first three stories, persevering only because the book itself is pretty short, but the final four - particularly the titular story - just about make it a worthwhile read overall.

The first story didn’t feel particularly intriguing; the plot is pretty straightforward but there is none of the tension or sense of foreboding that I think you would expect as you reach the climax of it. Or maybe I didn’t get what Miller was trying to achieve with it. In any case, the main character in this story is unlikable, but not in any way that I can get on board with, so it just wasn’t one to work with. The second story is quite long - or felt long - without going anywhere. The idea is interesting, I just felt the mystery it was trying to cultivate needed much more time to develop. The third was not especially grabbing, unfortunately.

Total, the fourth story and the turning-point in this collection, is a really interesting sci-fi dystopia. For me, there were echoes of Never Let Me Go and The Handmaid’s Tale, and although happy with the story as it was, I would happily read a whole novel based on the ideas and story created here. Stories 5 and 6 are interestingly woven stories: I found the characters engaging and the stories themselves felt more complete and tightly worked. And The Chekhovians is a great final story - lots of characters to keep track of, but I thought it was a finely observed and brutal episode of a family drama.

Total by Rebecca Miller is a collection of mildly unsettling short stories placed around various places and set in the present as well as the not to distant future.

Some of the stories stayed longer with me than others. I especially enjoyed the one about a novelist finding inspiration in an unlikely adventure in Dublin, the study of two families with different financial backgrounds including a plot twist in Martha’s Vineyard and the story of a woman randomly running into her abusive ex boyfriend on a street in New York, which makes her replay in her mind her past relationships.

What I personally enjoyed a lot about Total is the variety of topics and time that is portrayed. Each story takes you to a new place and you will get to know completely new characters every time.
The beautiful writing sometimes felt like a never ending thought process with yourself as a witness and other times as if you were in the room with the characters.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for this eARC in return for an honest review.

“Total” is a collection of short stories that, while all seperate, follow the themes of seven different relationships in a way that ties them all together at their cores. Rebecca Miller’s writing is powerful from the start and with a start like ‘Mrs Covet’ I’m not sure you could find anyone who could argue that her writing is anything but punchy.

Out of the seven stories in the collection my favourite had to be “Mrs Covet”. It follows the story of a couple struggling to look after their home and family following the birth of their newest child and a woman hired to help, only she might be too invested in their family.

Having been lucky enough to read a copy of this before it’s release on September 1st, I may just have to pop into a bookshop and pick up a physical copy for my shelves and reread, just so I can highlight my favourite lines.

I’m sad to say this book wasn’t for me. It’s a very interesting concept and I enjoyed the short story format, but I couldn’t get into it. The writing itself was nuanced and the stories well written in themselves, but I found them to be uncomfortable in the way they were talking about sex, although, I would guess that perhaps that was the author’s aim. Uncomfortable reads are not something I personally look for, but I’m sure there’s many who would enjoy Miller’s talent and bold approach to her work.

I have really mixed feelings about this collection.
This is the first book I’ve ever read off of net galley and therefore really wanted to like it.
But ultimately this book fell short for me.

Let’s start on a positive note-
The writing was consistently engaging and this book was definitely not bad.
This collection was just not for me.
The title story ‘total’ was by far the best story of them all, at least in my opinion. The whole concept of babies being born different- becoming a total- from the influence of technology is interesting and I’ve never read anything else like it.

However that’s really where the positives stop.
Don’t get me wrong I didn’t dislike the stories but none of them felt as complete or unique as ‘total’ did. ‘Total’ was so interesting that the other stories just blurred together.

My other big takeaway was the way fatness and bigger women especially, were treated and described.
Fatness in these stories was a way to alienate the characters, a moral bankruptcy or an awkwardness explicitly described by their weight.
The character of Nat in ‘Mrs. Covet’ was overly described as too large then later stole a baby.
Lara in ‘ The Chekhovians’ is said to have a too-large ass, she is an odd outcast who is overwhelmingly described by how her body has become so big.

I’m not sure if Miller meant this to be such a common theme, or it just happened to be a repetitive trope.
However for a collection that focus’ on womanhood it feels like a let down that fat people can only exist to be villains, weirdos or not exist at all.

I do want to clarify that I think Millers writing was great, I would be interested in seeing what she does with more speculative work similar to ‘total’. But for me, this collection wasn’t what I wanted.

I think I’m at fault with this one. I went through it blindly. I was very interested in the first story. I connected with the character and needed more of her life. But then suddenly, I found myself in a completely different story. I was utterly disappointed and couldn’t continue reading.

I do recommend it though. It is very interesting.

Rebecca Miller is easily a new favourite writer. While the collection has its ups and downs, I felt that each story was consistently strong and had me wanting them to be novella or novel length as I felt very attached to the characters and her unusual plots. Her writing was also highly addictive and readable, I'd often find myself reading two stories at a time. She carefully crafts nuanced characters in such short spaces - such as the woman with an addiction to love, the Van Camp/Chekhovian family, E's sister - as they struggle with weird relationships and situations which put pressure on major aspects of their lives. I know short fiction is something most people don't like, but this collection will certainly change your mind about it. I hate to be so vague but you really need to read this collection with as little knowledge as possible because it is simply fantastic and entrancing. I am eager to read Miller's future works and her backlog.

My personal favourite stories were (in order): The Chekhovians, Total and She Came To Me.

A collection of short stories, which aren’t for me. However the stories are just long enough to build an attachment to the characters and get a snippet of their lives and they build together throughout the stories over the overall theme.