A heavy-hitting emotional exploration of the ways lives can change in single moments.
Foster (God Is an Astronaut, 2014) explores people and relationships on the razor’s edge in this collection of moving short stories.
In each of the seven stories that make up this slim volume, the author places the reader directly into a workaday reality on the very cusp of changing forever. In the opening story, “The Theory of Clouds,” a couple’s secret is discovered when a group of outsiders arrives in a small, suspicious town. The title story zeroes in on a woman looking for direction while working the early shift at a local swimming pool. “The Place of the Holy” takes place at a home-turned–women’s shelter, where a young girl struggles to get the attention she needs from her mother. In concise and moving stories, the author creates compelling and unique characters with rich histories in the space of just a few pages. But what makes this collection electric is the endings. Each story cuts away just as it becomes clear that these people’s worlds have been changed, that the breaking point has been reached, and that whatever happens next could determine the course of their lives. Foster leaves each story at the exact moment when the reader wants more, a decision that could be woefully disappointing if not for her masterful use of tension and language. These short stories are brief windows opening into private moments of hope, pain, and struggle, and the decision to leave the reader guessing about what happens next underlines the universality of such quiet, impactful experiences.
A heavy-hitting emotional exploration of the ways lives can change in single moments.Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-543-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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
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