by Ellen Gilchrist ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 2014
Overly sentimental.
Disaster becomes the impetus for renewed faith in goodness, love and spiritual uplift in these 10 stories about kindhearted Southerners from Gilchrist (A Dangerous Age, 2008, etc.).
In the title story, Hurricane Katrina is a sideline disaster. An elderly couple, beloveds since high school in homespun Madison, Ga. (in reality, a town of restored quaintness full of retirees and tourists), is left on their own when their caregiver stays home to deal long distance with her evacuated son. Driving home from the grocery store, the octogenarians have a fatal accident, but the aftermath turns into a celebration of expanding connections. Similarly, in “The Dissolution of Myelin Sheath,” an ailing woman’s suicide influences her daughter’s therapist to appreciate life more. More elderly lovers appear in the sketch “A Love Story” and in “Jumping Off Bridges into Clean Water,” which skims nearly 50 years of another devoted relationship. Five teenage volunteers at the site of a tornado find the level of goodness in their lives permanently raised after they find a living baby in “Miracle in Adkins, Arkansas.” Ditto the accounting instructor in “Collateral,” who finds herself a husband after her stint in the National Guard in post-Katrina New Orleans. Equally charmed are the lives of two gay paramedics from Los Angeles who happen to be vacationing in the Big Easy when the hurricane hits in “High Water.” In “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” three Southern ladies (former sorority sisters) on their way to a vacation in Italy are delayed at Heathrow Airport during a bomb scare and share life stories with others stuck over free drinks and hors d’oeuvres in the first-class lounge—the sense of privilege, taken for granted by the author, may grate on readers. Rhoda Manning, a character from Gilchrist’s previous fiction, reappears in “The Dogs” to stir up her neighbors against uppity new move-ins with misbehaving mutts. The volume’s first hint of diversity appears in the final story, about a black child saved by kindly white plantation owners in 1901.
Overly sentimental.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61620-110-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ellen Gilchrist
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
IN THE NEWS
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Tim O’Brien
BOOK REVIEW
by Tim O’Brien
BOOK REVIEW
by Tim O’Brien
BOOK REVIEW
by Tim O’Brien
More About This Book
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
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.