This isn't just a book of story starters. It's a book on how to write stories, with a bunch of story starters finishing off each chapter (and plenty of suggestions worked into the material). The topics covered range from developing your character to stock characters and archetypes, conflict, using current events to inspire your stories, naming your character, using animals as minor characters, and more. The author approaches some of the material from the point of view of how you can use it to inspire ideas for stories (which fits the theme of the book perfectly), but other bits seem like they're meant to be part of a more generic book.
In some places, particularly the chapters that seemed more generic, the writing babbled and wandered a bit. There seemed to be a distinct lack of context for some things. The author threw out references all over the place without explanation, and although they referred to well-known works, not all of her readers will have read every one of those works (or remember the details necessary to make heads or tails of what she's trying to say).
Sometimes this book made perfect sense to me and was a joy to read; at others I felt lost and confused. Occasionally I felt like I was reading one book that had bits of another book woven into it, or a book that the author had just kind of plopped down onto paper in a semi-stream-of-consciousness manner, without going back to make sure everything fit in its place.
For the most part I really like the story starters themselves. Ms. Stanek provides a goodly number of them at the end of each chapter, and I'm sure that somewhere in there you could find something to inspire you. She also includes plenty of throw-away ideas within the text itself. Some of the starters are wild and crazy, which nicely fits into the idea of loose associations and flights of creativity. Others are more normal. Some seem rather hackneyed, however.
All in all I think this book serves as a good source of prompts. The story-writing material is a little less amazing, but since that isn't the focus of the book I see it as being less important. If you're buying the book just for the story starters and can buy it at an appropriate price for that, consider my rating to be a 4; otherwise, on the whole I'd give it a 3.
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