The first story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," was extremely shocking to me. However, it set a good precedent for the rest of the stories in the collection, which is that this was not a collection of feel good stories. Rather, it's extremely realist in nature, sparing no details of racism, sexism, ableism, hardship, religious bigotry, and violence in early 20th century Southern U.S states. It made me really think about the potential origins of the modern day American's psyche, and how history (even if fictional) rarely repeats, but rhymes. Because of this, I found that reading this book was a pretty bleak endeavor, even if it was extremely interesting and easy to read.

Despite the bleakness, I think this warrants a re-read because I think each story deserves a little bit more time to absorb. O'Connor puts so much into the stories and there is a lot to think about.