Women and girls often overlooked by history are given compelling voices in this collection.
In unsentimental but intimate detail, a collection of stories peels back stereotypes about the lives of women in the past. From the Old West to the 1960s, female lives that might be deemed ordinary are revealed as rich and complex.
Holladay (The Deer in the Mirror, 2013, etc.) focuses in these eight stories and one novella on girls and women trying to find their places in a world that often treats them as insignificant. A few of the stories have contemporary settings, but most take place decades or more than a century in the past. In spare but evocative prose, Holladay skillfully and subtly re-creates those earlier times while making clear their parallels to the present. The novella, A Thousand Stings, is the story of 8-year-old Shirley, striving to make sense of the impact of the 1967 Summer of Love on her small town, from a hippie minister who upends the family church to the blossoming of her older sister. In "Operator," set in 1954, a young woman working as a telephone operator and hoping to marry up tells us the surprising tale of what happens when she takes it upon herself to respond to an emergency call about a violent incident. Some of the best of these stories are set in the American West. In the title story, in 1854, young sisters Kate and Olivia sell their parents' Virginia farm after marrying a pair of brothers who persuade them to join a wagon train headed for Oregon—a harrowing journey with unexpected consequences. "Comanche Queen" is based on the true story of Cynthia Parker, who was captured by Comanches as a child, found 24 years later in 1860, and returned (with one of her children) to her white family. Parker spent the rest of her life trying to get back to the Comanches; Holladay tells her heartbreaking story from the point of view of her well-intentioned but benighted white relatives. "Interview with Etta Place, Sweetheart of the Sundance Kid" is just that, a fictional talk with the mysterious woman who was the companion of outlaw Harry Longabaugh. Holladay paints her at age 92, salty and humorous, recounting a startlingly different version of the deaths of Longabaugh and Robert Parker, aka Butch Cassidy. In a line that speaks for all the women in these stories, Place beseeches her interviewer, "Write it with me in the middle, not off to the side."
Women and girls often overlooked by history are given compelling voices in this collection.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8040-1204-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Swallow Press/Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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