Beautifully written and charged with vitality, this collection plucks people from an obscure place and tells their stories.
In his debut short story collection, Fierro offers windows into the often obscured world of East Los Angeles.
The characters in these stories live in a workaday area of LA, far from the glitz and glamour of Beverly Hills or Hollywood. East LA is predominantly Hispanic, and the author cuts through any perceived stereotypes to convey the area's diversity. The people here are mothers and fathers of kids growing up in the city or young people finding ways to carve out their own identities while connecting with their familial and cultural heritage. In the title story, baseball serves as a conduit between generations, highlighting the differences and similarities in one family as they watch a game at home. In “Minefield,” two young men work together with their grandmother to bury a statue in remembrance of the uncle they lost and explore the past lives of their family members. Many of the themes in the stories are universal, and the writing is weighted with a sense of urgency and emotion that comes through clearly. But the author's style is, at times, voyeuristic; the reader is dropped into circumstances that take time to fully unfold and are whisked out just as abruptly. Some stories become uncomfortable and alienating, such as "Beto Ordonez," in which a young boy responds to the Challenger explosion by acting out repeatedly in class. Although the author hints at underlying issues at home and a history of such behavior, these are overwhelmed by a sense of being held at arm's length.
Beautifully written and charged with vitality, this collection plucks people from an obscure place and tells their stories.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-816-53275-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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