"Then she pushed the board right up and wrote in large letters, bangles jangling in the silence, the words Look Upon The World With Love. Then she sat down at the table."

Free Love is an early collection of Ali Smith's short stories. it was published in 1995 and contains the following:

Free love*

A story of folding and unfolding

Text for the day*

A quick one*

Jenny Robertson your friend is not coming

To the cinema

The touching of wood*

Cold iron

College

Scary

The unthinkable happens to people every day

The world with love*

I marked my personal favourites (*) but unlike other collections there weren't as many stories in this one that have stuck with me. 

Even though Free Love is an early collection, there is visible brilliance in these stories. It is just that they are not moving with the same momentum or creating the same level of impact as some of the later stories. And yet, I cannot help but feel that some of the stories are more personal to the author than her later work.

I wanted to like this book, and the story isn't bad. But the writing is rough and I had trouble understanding the basketball. I'll chalk most of that up to cultural differences (Canadian vs American). 

There was one point where I could not figure out what was going on because I'm pretty sure there was a tip off between two point guards. Or maybe the one of the players was the center... in which case the center was bringing the ball up the floor at one point. Both of these situations are ridiculous, but it was too difficult to parse what was really going on. I gave up and just went with it. I was at the end of the book and it didn't really matter at that point.