Entertaining and evocative slice-of-life stories.
Worton presents a collection of short essays featuring random, amusing, and often tender memories and observations of family and everyday life.
The author was born in 1949 and raised in Massapequa Park, New York, a village on Long Island with a predominantly Jewish and Italian American population. Many essays here offer reflections on a childhood and adolescence defined by the postwar culture of the late 1950s. One vignette describes Sundays at her grandparents’ house in Brooklyn, where Grandma’s legendary spaghetti and meatballs ruled the day at a gathering of aunts, uncles, and cousins; another piece focuses on preparations for an aunt’s wedding. “We were big singers, guitarists, and accordion players in my Italian American family,” she writes of weekly get-togethers, with popular music playing in the background of her recollections. With amusement, she reveals that she fell madly in love with John Lennon as a teenager. At another point, Worton also shares how, at age 7, she inadvertently cut off a sizable lock of her best friend’s hair while they played beauty parlor in 1956. There are also vignettes about her emerging political activism in the ’60s as she moved into adulthood. Taken all together, the essays create a vivid pastiche of mid-to-late-20th century Americana. Worton effectively tells her stories in a breezy style, laced with both humor and poignancy. There’s a steady confidence in her prose as she meticulously observes and comments on her own actions, the world around her, and occasional esoteric thoughts that have made a home in her brain, as when she whimsically muses about the uniqueness of her penmanship—a hybrid of cursive and block letters that, she says, allow her to put her thoughts down as quickly as possible: “My straight-up-and-down letters that spill out of my pen when I’m pressed up against the wall for an idea, fighting to get something out of my head onto paper, are a chubby, staccato printing and script mash-up. It’s not pretty or classy.” Overall, the essays, which pivot back and forth between six decades, are generally engaging, although a few wrap up without satisfying resolution.
Entertaining and evocative slice-of-life stories.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798989403462
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Susan Schadt Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.
A grandmaster of the hard-boiled crime genre shifts gears to spin bittersweet and, at times, bizarre tales about bruised, sensitive souls in love and trouble.
In one of the 17 stories that make up this collection, a supporting character says: “People are so afraid of dying that they don’t even live the little bit of life they have.” She casually drops this gnomic observation as a way of breaking down a lead character’s resistance to smoking a cigarette. But her aphorism could apply to almost all the eponymous awkward Black men examined with dry wit and deep empathy by the versatile and prolific Mosley, who takes one of his occasional departures from detective fiction to illuminate the many ways Black men confound society’s expectations and even perplex themselves. There is, for instance, Rufus Coombs, the mailroom messenger in “Pet Fly,” who connects more easily with household pests than he does with the women who work in his building. Or Albert Roundhouse, of “Almost Alyce,” who loses the love of his life and falls into a welter of alcohol, vagrancy, and, ultimately, enlightenment. Perhaps most alienated of all is Michael Trey in “Between Storms,” who locks himself in his New York City apartment after being traumatized by a major storm and finds himself taken by the outside world as a prophet—not of doom, but, maybe, peace? Not all these awkward types are hapless or benign: The short, shy surgeon in “Cut, Cut, Cut” turns out to be something like a mad scientist out of H.G. Wells while “Showdown on the Hudson” is a saga about an authentic Black cowboy from Texas who’s not exactly a perfect fit for New York City but is soon compelled to do the right thing, Western-style. The tough-minded and tenderly observant Mosley style remains constant throughout these stories even as they display varied approaches from the gothic to the surreal.
The range and virtuosity of these stories make this Mosley’s most adventurous and, maybe, best book.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4956-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
