After reading "How to Breathe Underwater" I was beginning to think I liked short stories, so I had hopes for this bookI'm not normally a fan of short stories, so to hold my interest the book must be engaging. This book was not - it was just a long boring book.The first story was about getting his dead mother off the island, which actually was one of my favorite stories, but only because of the black humor of it.Some of the stories were written in a dialect that was very hard for me to understand."Lord Short Shoe Wants the Monkey" was just a weird story - I couldn't really get anything out of it. It might be because I'm not familiar with the Caribbean, therefore I couldn't appreciate the stories, whatever it is, I will not be keeping this book in my library.