by Elaine Slater ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2004
Despite the occasional stiff prose and too-clever conceits, these spare tales will capture many a reader's heart.
Bite-size slices of life and character compiled into a winning package.
Get past the syrupy title and the somewhat forced initial anecdote and you'll find that these sweet mysteries, a collection of short vignettes featuring a series of unrelated, mostly nameless male and female narrators, is an engaging, often heart-tugging read. Slater understands the narrative value of sparseness, as she reveals just enough about her very real characters to pique interest. “How She Remembers It” trails a pregnant young woman as she makes the lonely journey back to her rented room. Slater beautifully conveys her longing and solitude as she stares out the bus window into the living rooms of happier homes, the joyful singing of other traveling strangers as her soundtrack. In “The Way It Is Now,” the overly cute ending dampens the momentum of the author's unique sense of wistfulness, though the same touch works nicely in lighter fare, such as in the amusing “A Funny Thing Happened. …” While her sparse style constitutes the primary strength of her writing, the last vignette, “Too Much Love”–in which she gives too little information–demonstrates the pitfalls of the less-is-more approach. It's unfortunate that the book's weakest snapshots are its first and last, as a casual reader may peruse those and easily dismiss this collection. Dig between the covers, however, and you'll surely be rewarded for the effort.
Despite the occasional stiff prose and too-clever conceits, these spare tales will capture many a reader's heart.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-4137-0962-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
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
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2005
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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