Eight well-crafted, tough-minded stories of fractured lives that occasionally slip into caricature and repetition.
How the urge to find wholeness in one’s life can drive people down unexpected, sometimes destructive paths is the overriding theme of this debut collection.
All the stories center around children in Kentucky’s Bible Belt, many of them emotionally at risk. For newcomer Pneuman’s characters, religious practice is a fact of life taken for granted. Oddly, the title story is the weakest, relying too much on shock value. The narrator’s mother, distraught over her ex’s upcoming marriage, first neglects her daughter’s strep throat, then fails to notice the child’s potentially disastrous fascination with a deranged babysitter. The stories that follow are less extreme but more resonant. In the most heartbreaking, “Borderland,” another child of divorce competes hopelessly not only for her father’s affection but for the affection of the seemingly perfect father of a classmate. In “Holy Land,” a bookish young girl visits her non-religious grandparents with her angry mother after her father leaves them because he believes he’s become divine. In “All Saints’ Day,” a spunky minister’s daughter, whose mother suffers acute depression, risks punishment to help a little boy whose missionary parents believe he’s inhabited by a demon. A new recruit into the Salvation Army struggles against her own psychological demons while visiting her more stable sister in “The Bell Ringer,” one of the few stories in which the child is almost peripheral. The 13-year-old minister’s daughter in “Invitation,” a natural worrier, fears that she’s the first pregnant virgin since Mary. Two overweight 15-year-olds in “The Beachcomber” find their friendship unraveling when only one attracts a boy’s attention. The final story, “The Long Game,” in which a teenager’s father is dying of cancer, intertwines the crises of burgeoning sexuality, a parent’s mortality and the inevitable love-hate daughters feel for their mothers.
Eight well-crafted, tough-minded stories of fractured lives that occasionally slip into caricature and repetition.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-603075-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
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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