After hearing rave reviews, I picked up A.M. Homes “Days of Awe” with great anticipation. I was, in short, expecting to be awed. I wasn’t. These are for the most part good stories, some of them quite good. But they are not great. They possess neither the deftness of Alice Munro nor the raw power of Raymond Carver. There is a vast difference between quirky characters and those that are unrelatable—at times, the effort to create the former results in the latter. I liked the inventiveness of a story like “The National Cage Bird Show,” which is a series of exchanges made between the members of a chatroom for bird lovers. The sense of distance and disconnection between the members (yes, they all love birds, but the time they spend in the chatroom reflects their loneliness and isolation from the world) is revealed in their non-sequiturs and offhand utterances about their beloved pets. The story is pulled together in the posts of a lonely young girl and a lonely deployed soldier—neither of whom actually own birds. Their connection is purely cyber, again reinforcing the theme of disconnection prevalent in these tales. The inventiveness of telling a tale through chatroom posts was novel and it worked for me—other stories, not so much. Overall, the collection is solid, but perhaps I let my expectations get the best of me.