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Strange Fruit by James Cooper. Cooper's short story collection, Human Pieces, was the best single author collection I read last year. His novella Strange Fruit didn't lower the bar any. Similar to the stores in Human Pieces, Strange Fruit is a dark story peopled with flawed characters. A coming of age story about a friendless girl who is mercilessly bullied at school by the other girls, has a dysfunctional relationship with her single parent mother, and whose fantasies about the boy next door are crushed after a face to face encounter. Then Cooper introduces the man with the strange fruit who likes to hang around the park & watch the kids play. My only complaint was with the characterization of Ellie, the story's protagonist. At times she was portraited as a young girl (7-8 years old), other times she seemed to act more like a teenager (Cooper never established her age in the story). But anyone looking for dark, yet engaging fiction, can't go wrong with choosing something by James Cooper. 4.5 / 5