Instruct: Classify a given review into positive or negative sentiment.
Query: Hundreds of pages of depressing stories

LaPlante has filled (60-70% guess) of the book with examples of writing to illustrate her literary points. If you are therefore interested in reading three-to-four-hundred pages about death, rape, cancer, murder, abortion, hate, bigotry, mental illness, and similarly distressing topics, this is a book for you. This was a class textbook, so I was obliged (?) to read it, but by page five hundred, the selected depressing passages far overshadowed any value I might have otherwise gained about creative writing. It is implausible to me that she could not find equally good examples of a more pleasing nature. I cannot recommend it.