With additional work, this slim volume could be fleshed out into an intimate portrait of an unusual family of athletes.
This realist novella about one summer in the lives of an ice skating family takes a surprising turn.
Jilli, one of three children raised to be a champion ice skater, narrates this short novella. Her brother had won the silver in the 1972 Winter Olympic Games in Sapporo, Japan, and her sister, Rox, is feeling torn between her commitment to ice skating and her desire to be free from commitments so she can see her friends and connect with her Hawaiian heritage by hula dancing. And, although Jilli narrates, Rox is the star of the show. Their parents make a deal with her that she can have the summer off if, in the fall, she redoubles her efforts toward qualifying for the 1976 Olympics. Thus begins her summer of fun, replete with pool parties and boys and plenty of dishy stories to share with her sister in the morning. The story takes a startling turn, however, when Jilli recounts the local myth about “the White Witch,” who supposedly haunts a set of former mining caves where the kids like to party. Rox confesses that since she was a child, she felt drawn to the site of a mining accident, and this undeniable pull ends in tragedy. Ultimately, the novels feels a bit like a bait and switch; the family’s complete commitment to figure skating would certainly make for an interesting family dynamic, yet this storyline gets little airtime. A peek into the life of a highly competitive athlete would certainly have been a compelling hook. Somewhat abruptly, though, the story plunges into typical small-town tragedy, with no real discussion of the aftermath. It feels abrupt and somewhat forced, and the family’s interest in ice skating feels superfluous.
With additional work, this slim volume could be fleshed out into an intimate portrait of an unusual family of athletes.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491859971
Page Count: 56
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.
Seven stories, including a couple of prizewinners, from an exuberantly talented young Thai-American writer.
In the poignant title story, a young man accompanies his mother to Kok Lukmak, the last in the chain of Andaman Islands—where the two can behave like “farangs,” or foreigners, for once. It’s his last summer before college, her last before losing her eyesight. As he adjusts to his unsentimental mother’s acceptance of her fate, they make tentative steps toward the future. “Farangs,” included in Best New American Voices 2005 (p. 711), is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. His mother, who runs a motel after having been deserted by the boy’s American father, warns him about “bonking” one of the guests. “Draft Day” concerns a relieved but guilty young man whose father has bribed him out of the draft, and in “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” a bitter grandfather has moved from the States to Bangkok to live with his son, his Thai daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren. The grandfather’s grudging adjustment to the move and to his loss of autonomy (from a stroke) is accelerated by a visit to a carnival, where he urges the whole family into a game of bumper cars. The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. Even Ladda is in danger, as Little Jui’s bodyguards try to abduct her. Her mother tells Ladda a family secret about her father’s failure of courage in fighting Big Jui to save his own sister’s honor. By the time Little Jui has had her father beaten and his ear cut off, Ladda has begun to realize how she must fend for herself.
A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8021-1788-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
