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
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.
One of America’s great novelists (Lost Memory of Skin, 2011, etc.) also writes excellent stories, as his sixth collection reminds readers.
Don’t expect atmospheric mood poems or avant-garde stylistic games in these dozen tales. Banks is a traditionalist, interested in narrative and character development; his simple, flexible prose doesn’t call attention to itself as it serves those aims. The intricate, not necessarily permanent bonds of family are a central concern. The bleak, stoic “Former Marine” depicts an aging father driven to extremes because he’s too proud to admit to his adult sons that he can no longer take care of himself. In the heartbreaking title story, the death of a beloved dog signals the final rupture in a family already rent by divorce. Fraught marriages in all their variety are unsparingly scrutinized in “Christmas Party,” Big Dog” and “The Outer Banks." But as the collection moves along, interactions with strangers begin to occupy center stage. The protagonist of “The Invisible Parrot” transcends the anxieties of his hard-pressed life through an impromptu act of generosity to a junkie. A man waiting in an airport bar is the uneasy recipient of confidences about “Searching for Veronica” from a woman whose truthfulness and motives he begins to suspect, until he flees since “the only safe response is to quarantine yourself.” Lurking menace that erupts into violence features in many Banks novels, and here, it provides jarring climaxes to two otherwise solid stories, “Blue” and “The Green Door.” Yet Banks quietly conveys compassion for even the darkest of his characters. Many of them (like their author) are older, at a point in life where options narrow and the future is uncomfortably close at hand—which is why widowed Isabel’s fearless shucking of her confining past is so exhilarating in “SnowBirds,” albeit counterbalanced by her friend Jane’s bleak acceptance of her own limited prospects.
Old-fashioned short fiction: honest, probing and moving.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-185765-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Superb stylist L’Amour returns (End of the Drive, 1997, etc.), albeit posthumously, with ten stories never seen before in book form—and narrated in his usual hard-edged, close-cropped sentences, jutting up from under fierce blue skies. This is the first of four collections of L’Amour material expected from Bantam, edited by his daughter Angelique, featuring an eclectic mix of early historicals and adventure stories set in China, on the high seas, and in the boxing ring, all drawing from the author’s exploits as a carnival barker and from his mysterious and sundry travels. During this period, L’Amour was trying to break away from being a writer only of westerns. Also included is something of an update on Angelique’s progress with her father’s biography: i.e., a stunningly varied list of her father’s acquaintances from around the world whom she’d like to contact for her research. Meanwhile, in the title story here, a missionary’s daughter who crashes in northern Asia during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War is taken captive by a nomadic leader and kept as his wife for 15 years, until his death. When a plane lands, she must choose between taking her teenaged son back to civilization or leaving him alone with the nomads. In “By the Waters of San Tadeo,” set on the southern coast of Chile, Julie Marrat, whose father has just perished, is trapped in San Esteban, a gold field surrounded by impassable mountains, with only one inlet available for anyone’s escape. “Meeting at Falmouth,” a historical, takes place in January 1794 during a dreadful Atlantic storm: “Volleys of rain rattled along the cobblestones like a scattering of broken teeth.” In this a notorious American, unnamed until the last paragraph, helps Talleyrand flee to America. A master storyteller only whets the appetite for his next three volumes.
Pub Date: May 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10963-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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