A harrowing and powerful visualization of war’s aftermath.
St. Hilaire’s (Inseparable, 2015) 26 short stories and poems voice the individual agonies of soldiers and those who love them.
Dedicated to members of the armed forces, particularly those who suffer from PTSD or have committed suicide after returning home, the collection presents powerful testimony that war wounds run deep, fester, and remain—whether or not they are shared with others. Although the author offers these tales of trauma as a means of honoring service and lessening suffering, she understands the high stakes. A list of toll-free numbers for suicide prevention organizations and veterans’ groups appears at the end of the book. One strength here is an awareness of the limits of storytelling. Sometimes, despite a ready listener, soldiers refuse to recall their experiences. “I don’t owe you a story,” says a man who prefers to keep his time overseas private. Several tales reveal the irony of giving all to one’s country and then finding more loss and loneliness at home. We learn about psychological struggles, divorce, anger, unpaid bills, and extreme loneliness. The sense of abandonment resonates most powerfully in the first story, narrated by an injured soldier trapped in a cave. He faces a sheer, insurmountable slope of rock and can hear comrades debate his position, but they seem at first disbelieving and then unwilling to help. His position is bleak. As day turns to night, the darkness in the cave expands. An active nightmare scene ensues. The poems are less successful than the stories, as they deal in worn-out tropes. In “Honor,” for example, awkward syntax dilutes what should be a provocative subject: “ ‘To serve with honor’ is a phrase oft spoken, / Repeated over like a record broken.” The last story effectively emphasizes the worth of serving one’s country, but another reality hits hard too, with appropriately strong diction. Every “motherfucking thing on this earth,” a soldier swears, has its breaking point.
A harrowing and powerful visualization of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: April 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5306-1777-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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